Mid-Summer Bee Report , 2nd of July

With weather sunny, very dry, with low humidity and temperatures in the 90s, we extracted our second batch of honey for the year from our strong hive. Being very effective last time, we used a fume board again and removed 2 small honey supers with little fuss. The bees hadn’t created much new honey since we checked 2 weeks prior, not even new capping. We had been waiting to ensure the nectar flow was complete. We extracted happily another 50 lbs of lightly golden sweet honey, almost the exact same color as our previous batch and bottled the following day, adding my label that Sue Ann helped improve and made a pdf file for as pictured above.

Regarding the weak hive, we had killed the second queen as she too was not laying and had added the hive body to the top of the strong hive to keep mice at bay. We returned it to the original platform before we removed the honey supers keeping in mind that it only takes bees 45 minutes to realize they do not have a queen. Later in the day we added a nuc to the weak hive which we purchased from Mark Antunes and has a ton of bees and a queen that lays beautifully. To add the nuc we did the following: On top of the original hive body, we placed a queen excluder and then a sheet of newspaper with a few slates cut into it and then added a hive body we had been saving in the freezer that still had built out frames, some even filled with honey. We removed 5 frames and then added the nuc which is basically a mini hive with 5 frames of brood and a queen. We added 2 jars of light sugar water and hope we can get this hive in good shape before the winter. We returned a few days later to remove the queen excluder and newspaper and hope that they have happily become acquainted with one another.