Honey Harvest: Hindsight

After a very spotty season, we've spun the last of our honey. It amounts to about 10 gallons, or 1,280 ounces, which should fill the 72 eight-oz. jars and 48 one-pound jars. It's less than we expected, but more than enough for us and our friends. It's another reason I was happy to move to Wisconsin - as of 2004, we are the ninth-largest honey producer in the nation.

We started with four hives of Russian-and-Yugoslavian hybrid Carniolans who made it through the winter. One hive didn't. They didn't starve, they absconded for some unknown reason. We had to move the hives to a friend's empty horse pasture because of zoning laws and an unfortunate neighbor who is known for complaining about anything and everything going on in our half-mile stretch that could be called a neighborhood. I decided it wasn't a good year to try to expand, given the situation of no real home for my bees.

Then, in May, Wally sold me three Italian queens to re-queen some of my cranky Carniolan hives, but I discovered that it was too late in the season; the bee populations had already picked up so that it was impossible to find the queen - even after two passes on each frame in every box by two people. All I could do was steal some brood from each of the hives and give it to one of the new queens to create a nuc (a hive nucleus that spends its first year building out the hive in order to make it through the winter but produces no extra honey for the beekeeper), but they've struggled all season to establish themselves.

We "doubled up" two of the hives, putting each one on top of a healthy hive to try and harness some of those populations. The theory was that, with a queen excluder between the sets of hive bodies, the healthy hive below would "work up" once they'd done a significant amount of build-out in their lower boxes, by moving up and helping out the new Italian hive draw comb in their boxes.

This didn't work, to the best of my observation, so neither of these hives have done much in the way of drawing out comb in the brood boxes, or putting much honey in for the winter. My guess is that the lower hive could smell the upper hive queen, and didn't want to go into her territory; they might also have been discouraged from coming up by the Italians, since they would smell like their own queen.

One of the three Italian nucs should make it through the winter. This is the one that, instead of doubling up, we gave the remnants of the workers left in the swarm hives we picked up (noted below) , who are generally good workers. But I don't know about the other two. I don't think there's much I can do now; I probably should have borrowed another frame of brood for each of them a month ago, and if I'd had drawn comb to give them, that could have helped too.

We were called in to capture two swarm hives, and thought we'd managed to get them both with queens intact. But neither turned out to have a queen - they may have "balled" her when they were shifted to a new site; sometimes bees do this if they are alarmed and either think the queen has done something wrong or that they need to protect her like they did when they swarmed away from the original hive: they mass around her, and she suffocates - so most of the bees absconded and in one hive, a laying worker took over and began cranking out drones. Our choices were to let them die out and let the workers abscond, or join them with another hive. So we gave them to the one group of Italians I mentioned above. They seem to be the one strong new hive.

About a month and a half ago, one of the old hives swarmed, and we had no luck finding them early in the day. My better half went out later in the day, by the time when the swarm should have travelled on to their final destination, in the off chance he would find them. He did - about thirty-five feet up in a pine tree. We weren't able to get them back, and the remainder of the hive was fairly weakened. I didn't worry too much about them at the time because the old hives seemed to be doing fairly well, and those Carniolans are too cranky to kill, in my opinion.

Apparantly I was wrong. When we checked the hive this week, it was completely empty, and everything - pollen and honey - had been robbed by the other hives. For some reason, the hive absconded. It may be that the new queen, who stays with the original hive, wasn't able to make the transition and died, or it may be that they simply all got the "swarm" message, and every subsequent hatching queen departed with what workers she could, after completing her mating flight and resting for a few days.

Our total number of hives went from four to seven, then to nine, then back down to seven, and ending with six to date. If it were earlier in the season, I would try to create a nuc out of the abandoned hive, with all that lovely drawn comb. But it would be an exercise in futility now; they would barely have enough time to get a few frames of bees hatched out before the weather penned them in - without any honey or pollen.

Cross-posted at Guide to Midwestern Culture.