We thank God for a bountiful honey season. There are always a number of factors and things that can come up out of your control that will reduce or negate the honey that you can spin out. This time things went relatively like clockwork. This year we had a scale in our honey spinning location so that we could weigh the box before we spun and then weigh it again afterwards. After weighing a number of the ’empty’ boxes, we found they were all relatively the same, so if we spun out all the frames we could tell what the honey + capping weight was just by standing on the scale beforehand with the box. When we originally started giving these honey supers to the bees in early summer, there may have been a couple with half the frames drawn out; but by and large, most of these honey supers were bare – just the plastic foundation to start with. They say to consider yourself fortunate if you get any honey to spin out in that situation. So, in that respect, these are very encouraging numbers.

Total honey spun out: 507 lbs  (hey, that’s over a quarter ton 🙂

Honey by hive:

A – 117 lbs (3.2 supers)
B – 75 lbs (2 supers)
C – 98 lbs (3 supers)
D – 114 lbs (3 supers)
E – 64 lbs (2 supers)
M – 39 lbs (1.3 supers)

Per hive average: 84.5 lbs
Per hive average on the new bee yard on my folk’s property: 93.5 lbs

A few notes on this:

• The M hive is from our home Minnesota hive. The 3 hives we tried to run here did not fare well. One of them overwintered with some bees still surviving, started building up a new population, but then died out in early spring. The two other hives started out as nucs that came up from Mississippi. But they were exposed to European Foulbrood (EFB) disease, and never seem to take off. One went queenless right away, and we let it raise a new queen but it didn’t take. The other lasted partway through the summer but also went queenless, and the new queen took a number of weeks to start laying. So we only got 39 lbs from that one, the equivalent of one full super.
• Hive E is the north-most colony of our A-E hives and it also had be population trouble beginning mid summer. It still seemed to maintain a good number of bees, but they were not drawing new wax, even during honey flow. Should be able to make a determination shortly on the actual situation of the hive and if we think it can be winter able.
• The success story is actually hive D, coming in second the pounds of honey spun out of it. On June 23rd, this hive was found in shambles. The area had just 4 inches of rain and the ground was very soft in the location of that hive. The hive stand legs sunk forward into the ground until all 4 boxes tipped over. My dad stood them back up and reinforced the hive stand. We had no idea if the queen was still below the excluder, let alone alive. The rest of the season proved that this little mishap did not phase them.
• The uncapped honey we made a determination on. Some I spun out for our own use because it it seemed dried all the way down. The rest I saved to feed back to the bees – which came mostly from hive A as they went to town drawing out and filling a 4th super late in the season.
• From 2012 to 2014, we ran only 1 or two hives per season on our own home property. We averaged 78 lbs of spun honey per hive. Our five hives this year on my folk’s 40 acres of wooded and prairie property, starting with less drawn wax on average than prior years, came in at 93.5 lbs average per hive. I think this does demonstrate the superiority of the new location since I did not consider it an above average year for honey flow. But I could be wrong. We will see what next year brings.

This is a beautiful site. It was quite a team effort to get the labels re-worked for this season’s honey sales, printing them, cutting them, pealing and affixing. Thanks to some great help like Amy Moreland.

The day 1 team:

We have made a few more jars of Bright Eyes Honey available on our website that we were able to fill. Once the rest of the honey gets organized, we may be able to make some additional stock available as well. A chunk of it is designated for gifts and fundraisers.