Sorry for the hiatus! We spent a lot of time this past summer trying to get footage, but the sun on the camera combined with the heat prevented us from recording.

Today we checked the honey boxes, and are going to complete a treatment for those pesky little varroa mites (that will be in a separate blogpost). If you don’t keep the population of mites down, you can lose your entire colony.  You can never really rid your colony of these parasites, but you can keep their population manageable.

Our first look at the frames of hive one shows fully built out frames and some capped honey. The honey is a dark (and sweet) honey that you see later in the season, more into fall. It tends to be more nutritious and will help to sustain the bees throughout the winter.  

This check will also serve as one last look to make sure there’s no swarming behavior happening. This is rare in fall, but we still want to make sure there are no supercedure or queen cells being created.

Because of the time of year, you can see the bees are a little on the aggressive side.  They are trying to protect their winter stores of honey to make sure they have enough to sustain the hive over the winter.

In hive two, we saw just as much capped honey as we did in hive one!! 

Based on the amount of honey we see at this point in the season, we will be able to harvest some honey this year!!!  Our contest winners should keep an eye on the mail in the next month for their honey samples!!!

You can watch the full hive checks here!  Our next blog post will go into the actual varroa treatments and we’ll show you how that is done.

~Chris, The Boxing Beekeeper