HONEY!
7/01/2005 I opened the hives today in order to check to see if the bees needed some
additional room. To my great surprise I found in the top box a couple of frames of open honey. See
the pictures below for more details.
Open Honey
The frame below is full of open honey. The bees leave the honey open until they can dry it out to
an appropriate moisture content is achived (around 15-18% water).
In this next picture the bees have begun to cap off the honey.
7/17/05
I checked on the hives today and added some more supers so the bees have plenty of room to fill it up
with honey. The picture below shows a frame with capped honey at the top and open honey elsewhere.
Also the dark spots on the comb is some pollen that the bees have stored up.
Here is a frame full of open honey. I have one medium super full of honey. This is about 45-50 lbs of honey. If they fill up all the supers I have put on each hive will put up about 100 lbs of honey.
The thing a beekeeper likes to see the most is a full frame of capped honey. There was about two full frames capped in each hive. This is just one of them. I had scratched a little bit of the cappings off when I pulled out the frame and some honey started to drip. Kendra and I took a taste test and thought it was wonderful.
The picture below shows the current state of my hives. I have three medium hive bodies on for the brood space. The top most medium super is for honey. Also I have a queen excluder on between the third and fourth boxes in order to keep the queen from trying to lay eggs in the honey.
