Sweet

They say not to expect the bees to make excess honey in the first year, and that each hive will need 10 frames full for winter. By that calculus, our bees made about twice as much as they need, and so we have harvested. We borrowed one of the Bee Club's extractors and spent a few days as a sticky cottage industry. We hope this might last us the year too. 

Alternative Accommodation

Hippolyta and Hazel have moved out. 

My guess is that we weren't fast enough with that larval princess and the extra box and so Hippolyta took her best warriors and left, I guess this because we haven't found her corpse, and because I'm optimistic although we haven't heard of or seen a swarm with a green dotted queen around here. Good luck to them. 

Of course, that leaves the Flow hive queenless. 

https://www.honeyflow.com/resources/blog/diagnosing-a-queenless-hive/p/269 

But it might not be as awful as it sounds. It means they're making oodles of honey and we saw a capped supercedure queen cell, so they may well sort out a queen pronto, if they do, we'd like to mark her with blue for 2020. 

We also moved a frame of brood from the 3/4 hive, and will keep doing so every week because that's supposed to keep the force balanced, that is, the pheromones from the brood should keep the workers from starting to lay oodles and oodles of drones. 

Hazel has a room in tiny flat in Bidwill Street, her delightful flatmates seem to share an intention to live in serenity. Good luck to them too. 

Sticky.

Even though it's her first year building up the colony from a wee nuc, Sean and Iris found so much honey in Malka's hive they pulled out a frame to give her more room to lay in (and not get the urge to swarm). 

(Photo by Sean). 

Humans have various ways of getting honey out of honeycomb, I have seen my favourite at Thai hotels' breakfast buffets which often have a frame of honeycomb straight from the hive (shown here with a small Iris). 

So we read up about getting honey out without an extractor and tried to let it drip out overnight...

But honeycomb did not evolve to let honey drip out easily as that would be quite inconveniently sticky for the bees, and here in temperate Wellington it didn't come. So this morning Iris and I decided to put it in a more tropical spot, that being a car parked in the sun. 

Unfortunately, it got too hot and the wax melted off the frame. 

Fortunately, 

Honey!!!

Looks and tastes like Clover, as does our lawn; and now also, a surprising amount of the kitchen. 

Hormonal

On Boxing Day Hippolyta's colony in the Flow hive were tense, warning us off: flying back and forth in front of my face and stinging our gloves a little, so we stopped the inspection after four frames as we already knew they needed more space and soon. Also that whatever mood they were in, we'd have to bother them again to give space to them. 

We thought about various options and decided to add an ordinary super of ordinary deep frames above a queen excluder. The next day I ordered frames from Ceracell and early the morning after, they arrived. We set up the super in a "brood box" I'd ordered previously from Flow. 

We inspected the Flow hive, it was teeming with bees and there was brood comb stuffed in everywhere, including into the middle of the feeder.  We took 3 or 4 frames of honey from the brood boxes up to the super and put naked foundation in instead. We also removed a queen cell we believe to be a swarm cell, no wonder they were acting tense, I expect they were feeling expectantly hormonal and Hippolyta would have been passing on pheromones with the added stress of preparing to move house. 

 

http://scientificbeekeeping.com/understanding-colony-buildup-and-decline-part-7b/ 

Sean and Iris also have put another super on the 3/4 hive, and we hope that with two supers they might have enough honey for us to harvest some! We made a lid for them that's framed transparent PET and so we looked in after a day or two but the new super was so full of bees that it was difficult to see what they were doing. 

Since the super went on the Flow hive, they have been happily building comb next to the windows in the upper brood box, and I also popped a wee comb receptacle above the hole in the middle of the Flow hive lid, in case they want to build up there in the middle again. It's a carefully cleaned wee box that came with commercial honeycomb inside it, upside-down on some foundation all wrapped in paper and with a hole for the bees to get into it. I have not planned how I'm going to harvest this wee box, but if the lid feels excitingly heavy, I expect I'll think of something. 

With a bit of space and the lack of the queen cell, the Flow hive colony must have been feeling much more serene because while I was adding the wee box with no smoke or suit (not my wisest moment, but I'm trying to keep this journal factual), the hive lid went a bit skew and, although a goodly number of bees spilled out and I squashed some putting it straight, none chose to sting me. 

 So tall!

So very tall! Note the second entrance. 

Top entrance, 3/4 hive. They seem to mostly be using it for climate control at the moment. 

 Back window, Flow hive. 

North window, Flow hive. This foundation has been being built up for 5 days. 

 South window, Flow hive. Only 5 days!