The weather on Saturday cooperated long enough to remove three honey supers from the hive.
Mom's special bee-exiting board worked beautifully. We had perhaps 20 girls left above the device and they were easy to brush off prior to lugging the frames inside.
We didn't actually do any extracting...that will probably happen later this week.
We also took a peek inside our 4th super and discovered that only capped brood remained, in addition to honey. This was excellent news so we stuck mom's exit board down below that super and will take it off later this week. Hopefully all the brood will have hatched and left us bee-less and honey rich! We're keeping our fingers crossed on that front.
Here is what Mud Honey Hive currently looks like:
The blue band between the deep supers and the honey super is our bee board.
In other news:
My bee suit is getting a little tight in the tummy region.
And we also took the opportunity to do a little fall cleaning, specifically, dismantling our long-defunct Blue Moon Hive. We weren't exactly sure what killed this hive so we scraped down all the frames (I'll use the wax for candles this fall) and I'll pop the entire operation into the freezer to defend against wax moths and other vermin. We're very confident that the hive's demise wasn't due to foulbrood so hopefully the freezer trick will leave the equipment ready for use, come spring. Now we just need a new colony to populate it!
A mummified bee
Pollen that was left over from the hive. Pretty, no?
And that, my dears, is the latest and greatest, in regards to our beekeeping activities.
