I am a second year bee keeper and finally have a few supers worth of honey. I want to try to keep all of my extracting to the same day so I don't have to clean up my mess multiple times over. Being in Upstate/western NY should I pull them now or can I leave them on through June?
That's a loaded question.
Are they capped, then you can pull them.
For us in the South, our best time is when the supers are capped and while the flow is still on. If you have the only hive within miles then any time. If there is no flow, robbing starts almost immediately and gets really bad especially when you have hundreds of commercial hives right on top of you like I do. Last year I could hardly remove 2 boxes and I would have to stop and turn on the sprinklers to stop the robbing. That makes it very hard to remove supers with 12 hives. It took 2 days. This year, we are waiting until they remove the commercial hives which was last night. :happy:
Michael Bush, in Nebraska, waits until winter to pull honey. He waits until the bees are in cluster in the brood box. This allows him to determine hive size and how much honey he needs to leave for the bees. By doing it this way, he doesn't have to clear the bees out of the supers.
Jim
>Michael Bush, in Nebraska, waits until winter to pull honey. He waits until the bees are in cluster in the brood box
I wouldn't call it "winter" but yes, they are clustered. More like September or October depending on the when it starts getting cold enough for them to cluster.
Good info. Thanks!
So Michael, do you just keep adding Supers throughout the season and like you said remove the Supers when they cluster?
Cheers
Steve
>So Michael, do you just keep adding Supers throughout the season and like you said remove the Supers when they cluster?
Yes. I only get to devastate the kitchen once a year...
I am in Alabama, could I pull some frames from my super right now and leave a few more until fall?
Quote from: Michael Bush on June 07, 2017, 12:29:19 PM
>Michael Bush, in Nebraska, waits until winter to pull honey. He waits until the bees are in cluster in the brood box
I wouldn't call it "winter" but yes, they are clustered. More like September or October depending on the when it starts getting cold enough for them to cluster.
I do almost the same in October for the same reasons but they are not clustered. They do at night so the bee escape is very effective. Put it in one day pull off the supers the next. Easy, peezy. MY wife has no issues with messing up the kitchen for extracting honey. We have dogs and muddy paws is a common thing.
You can harvest as many times as you like, but once you pull the honey you have to get it extracted or freeze it so the small hive beetles and wax moths don't eat it all...
Haha yeah I hear you load and clear about the mess, I only rob twice a year for the same reason but I think i might have to increase to three times as we have a mild climate and even in the middle of Winter I can smell the Honey ripening of an afternoon.
Cheers
Steve