Down to one (crazy tough) hive

I am about 3 weeks late getting out to my hives and opening them up for their end of summer checkup and fall prep. In early August you should pull the honey supers (the frames with honey to harvest) and put on a mite treatment and start feeding them 2:1 sugar water. This allows them to focus on building up their stores before the cold weather hits.

I knew the right hive was low on bees, but when I finally suited up today I found the yellow jackets had either pushed them out or moved in when the bees absconded. So I wasn’t that surprised about no bees, but all of those grow jackets made the job 1000% more difficult!

I had to pry off (they seal them crazy tight with wax) and then remove (they can get heavy) each box, inspecting each frame to confirm there were no bees or usable resources. I sat each one out in the grass so the yellow jackets (and bees, if they want) can pick everything clean. Then after dark I will re-sweep off each frame before storing all of the equipment.

The left hive is a beast, and I mean that as the highest beehive compliment! Those girls were fighting off any yellow jackets (and there were SO many), and they had strong numbers and were fighters. Loved seeing that. They are strong in numbers and had a box and 1/3 of capped honey, which we will spin out some evening in the next few weeks. And they have plenty of remaining honey for their use. I added their mite treatment and gave them a few jars of syrup to further reinforce their stores.

This hobby/lifestyle choice would be a lot easier if I did it more often. It can be exhausting when you have so much mess to clean up all on one hot summer day.

Beekeeping is such a fashionable activity. You know this is a “Before” picture, because I am smiling. By the end of today’s session, I wasn’t exactly smiling, mostly just sweating and swearing.

My taped-up rubber boots typically protect me just fine. I used to go out with just Crocs, but that’s just dumb. Unfortunately, today I did get a sting on my inner upper ankle, so somewhere there was a flaw in my foot solution.

I don’t have any photos of today’s process - it took all my strength and focus just to complete the job. But here are some “After” shots of the remaining hive and the busy bees:

This was pretty much what I was dealing with all morning poking around the hives. Steve started up the smoker, which is supposed to calm them a bit. But there was no getting away from the craziness today. Luckily I felt very confident in my zipped-up beekeeping suit (other than when I got stung on my ankle in the middle of it all!)

This is actually an interesting picture (and the ones below, too) because you can see tthe yellow pollen balls on some of the bees. So this means they are still bringing in pollen from the flowers, which is great. You can also see a number of yellow jackets - their yellow color sticks out. The honeybees will make fast work of them, booting them out where they do not belong.

Steve has a bunch of yellow jacket traps that he will set now that we have closed down their beehive condo.