Every day my husband walks down to the bee hive to have a look. He sees bees coming in and out and it seems like all is well. We keep looking at flowers, both wild and cultivated. My husband nearly had a stroke when I wanted to cut the lawn because so many clover flowers had bloomed. We compromised and I left two large sections uncut.
He added a second brood box, at the same time checking the health of the hive and the “busyness” of the bees in both bee and honey production. Again, things looked good. Our bee supplier and local honey-master told us they needed to fill this second brood box with honey for the winter.
He added the super, the top box, the place where “our” honey will be produced, the box with the special HoneyFlow mechanisms for retrieving honey with a spout rather than using an extractor. He placed a queen inhibitor between the 2nd box and the top box. This is a sort of screen which prevents the larger queen from going into the top box to lay eggs.
He built a shelf of varying heights to hold the jars while they fill with honey. And, last but not least, he enlisted the help of our neighbor to fall some trees that were shading the hive.
We watched, we waited, we are still waiting.
But hold on here! A fellow honey producer told us she has already collected several pounds of honey. Is something wrong??? We phoned our honey-master and yes, he said we should have honey by now and that we’d better check the hive and see what was up. We spoke to a neighbor, also a bee keeper novice, and he hasn't extracted any honey yet either, so he and my husband got together to check their hives.
Our honey-master said they might be “honey bound”, that maybe the queen inhibitor was keeping bees from entering the top box. Be aware, he said, that when checking the middle box (2nd brood box) it could be full to the brim with honey and extremely heavy.
But it wasn’t heavy. It was only partly filled with honey. There were quite a few bees in the top box though so they decided the queen inhibitor is not the problem. Not enough flowers around? Did they swarm at some point without our knowledge? Were those trees shading the hive so much they were inactive much of the day?
Another call to our honey-master. Thank heavens for his help. There is so much to learn! Just being able to tell the difference between worker bees, the queen, the larval cells, the honey cells - gleep. To a novice, none of these things are all that obvious. But our honey-master, surprise, surprise, is currently busy harvesting honey, so we’ll have to wait and see how it goes. Will update when we know more.
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