On September 6th, the day before Labor Day, we went to the bee yard to pull off the honey supers. It went real well, but perhaps involved a bit more moving of the boxes than turned out to be necessary.

Jana is holding up one of the bee escapes. We were concerned that they wouldn’t work as well as they typically would because it was such a hot/humid weekend, and did not cool off too much overnight. Thought maybe the bees would not go down lower so much to cluster, but it looks like they did or they just move around a lot anyway, which I think is typical. This is the bottom of the escape board and there is a bunch of bees up there. Jana added an extra empty box for them on this hive (C) since they only had two mediums left. I don’t think too mediums is sufficient to go into winter, so we’ll have to replace those empty frames with full drawn wax and start feeding this colony soon.

Next, Jana is working the last of the 5 hives that we robbed. This was the tallest stack. Just two supers left to go.  With the woods in the background, the bees, the beautiful woman in white, and hundreds of pounds of honey — this is like a fantasy land. A very special and exciting time to be a part of.

Some of the supers still had a good number of bees roaming around, though far less than they would have normally. We took care of that with a leaf blower my dad got going not too long before our honey excursion here. We were able to blow out the bees, brush off the stragglers, and rotate the box around to do it from more angles if needed. We managed to get the boxes pretty clean. We stacked the boxes first on a trailer that my dad pulled behind his car. We had a damp bed sheet that we could keep over the boxes as we added each new one.

At one point the bees really were filling up the area, so we pulled the wagon ahead a bit and finished with the boxes. From there we pulled the trailer a few hundred yards up the path were I had an enclosed Chevy Blazer waiting. We loaded the boxes in the back of there, replaced the bed sheet on them and drove them to my folks. From there we drove them home later in the evening.

The ‘bee escape’ is not well named from the perspective of the bees. Below is a ‘free’ bee flying over her sisters stuck behind the little top hole opening of the bee escape. They are not too happy about the situation, but we sure thank them for the favor of their honey. And they were all actually quite well behaved. I’ve taken honey from a single hive much more agitated than all 5 of these combined.

Lot’s of bees hanging outside the hives afterward. Hopefully, they will slowly make their way back in their brood boxes and avoid rain that is to be coming. The following weekend we plan to go through the hives, see which ones are queen-right and healthy, and redistribute extra honey frames as necessary. Our schedules did not permit us doing this at the same time as the harvest.