miracle honey harvest

In May I threw in the towel with my hobby as a beekeeper when my bees swarmed to parts unknown the first day after I placed them in my backyard bee box.  My beekeeper friend had the same thing happen after just a week.

We still had the hive we nursed through the Wisconsin winter.  We checked the bee boxes several times during the summer and each time the verdict was tenuous at best.  We moved the boxes several times to fool the bees into producing “brood” baby worker bees.

Without much hope we added the “super” to the hive in early July.  The super is a smaller box designed to hold just ten frames and it put at the top of the brood boxes.   The purpose of the “super” is to have the bees fill it with honey to use through the winter while the bees live in the brood boxes below.

A week ago we noticed the bees were working hard to fill the “super” with honey – we could only hope they would create enough honey by the end of August to allow us to harvest some.  When you harvest honey the amount of water in the honey is critical – it is best to be 18% or below.  We tested two weeks ago and the honey was about 21% water and we decided to bide our time.

Finally, this past Sunday decided the moment had arrived.  We pulled six frames that were full of honey and left four frames for the bees to continue to fill up.  Those six frames gave us 15 pounds of honey.  A miracle!
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We’ve decided to limit our harvest to this single event.  The bees need time to replace the honey in the six frames and to continue to fill the remaining four frames.  That will give them a supply for our harsh Wisconsin winter.
There’s nothing better than a dollop of fresh honey on hot oatmeal on a frosty Wisconsin winter morning.