Your extracting line with your Family is outstanding! How was your honey yield this year as compared to past years?? Seems like you had an excellent crop?? 👍👍
I think that's the smoothest I have ever seen your honey house team working. In the past Carrey would be cooking, and then others (such as yourself... Grin) would be slowing the process down, but this whole group was just smooth like butta!
This summer sure flew past. Seems like yesterday we were complaining about 5' of snow in the bee yards. Life is like a roll of toilet paper: the more you use, the faster it goes.
I probably don't have to tell you this but make sure you tell them how proud you are of them. Looks like they can bust it. My 12 year old goes to fast sometimes in the bee yard and I tell her to slow it down that I just want it done right!
Yesterday there was a bunch of bees at the swarm trap so I thought I thought I caught a swarm but it was a queen imagine got lost on her mating flight because there might have been a 100 working bee's and I don't know how many drones a bunch
Well, I don't have to feel too bad now. Just pulled the last yard yesterday with my son. Now to extract the last two yards and that's a wrap for 2023 honey season.
Wow, your kids do great work! Nice to see. As an Iowa guy that grew up on a farm it sure is neat to see wheat and canola getting harvested. Its all corn and soy beans here.
Hey Ian, I see you shaking out queenless brood chambers, examining the frames that have pollen in them and some feed (likely also checking for disease), and are then just leaving on the ground to be robbed out? I use to consider such frames as the core component for making the best asset possible for rapid spring colony buildup. As someone that has made and sold thousands of nucs they become like money in the bank come spring by doing these steps: After I blew out the brood boxes I'd put them on a strong queen-right colony over a queen excluder and let those colonies plug it out with feed. Each frame became a bee-prepared mega power-pack of nutrition, ready for use as needed in the spring. Better than pollen patties and feed buckets. They could be dropped into the heart of a brood chamber of a hungry colony, but usually I would make up future brood chambers with two or three of them in the middle and set them on hives over queen excluders, around the 10th of April. Four weeks later those colonies had to be split or they would be swarming. Driven by the urges of spring, they would have converted all that nutrition into baby bees, and prepped the frames for laying into, even though they were above a QE. Perfect for making up nucs or converting into cell builders, etc. Regarding efficiency, all your tools for this are now at your fingertips: the post honey flow bees looking for work, queen excluders, your feeding system already right there. Easy peasey. Peal them off at your convenience sometime later in the fall, and ensure the host hive has enough feed. As you always demonstrate, beekeeping tasks and goals are always about prep for next stages ahead (except honey harvest). I hope you find my sharing this with you useful.
I forgot to mention that doing the steps above it also minimizes/eliminates robbing in the yard, when combined with open-source feeding. I came to hate pail feeding time, all the handling, sticky-ness, mess and storage of pails/tanks/pumps. Open source drum feeding bees are happy bees. As a diagnostic method, colonies that don't take up syrup aren't queen right so are quick to identify by a quick heft check, and their neighbours are not motivated to rob them. Been doing it commercially for over 40 years. @@aCanadianBeekeepersBlog
So...frequency & vibration plays a part in nature. Thriller music from Michael Jackson, a satanist, is not good. Suggest different genre for bees and honey.
