gardening in the boroughs of nyc: urbanbeekeeping

Monday, October 13, 2014

Fall Honey Harvest 2014

It's been months since I wrote on my blog. I'm terrible. I don't know where the summer went. It went fast. Here's a quick update of what happened last month. We harvested honey from our hives. In the beginning of the season, we had high hopes and was hoping to have a big harvest of honey. We started the season with 2 hives and grew it to 4 hives by adding 2 Nucs. We had a series of problems such as some kind of poisoning killing off almost half of our bees. Plus we had a slow cool summer, with wet temperatures. We were lucky to even have any honey to harvest with these issues. We inspected the hives and pulled the super frames for harvesting.

Of the 4 hives, we only could pull 10 frames of honey. Way less than last year's harvest. Last year we pulled 18 frames in the Fall and we had less hives!.

But at least we had a harvest. Our first year we didn't have anything to harvest. So we are glad to have some honey.

It's amazing to me that these two frames of honey are from the same hive! The top one is likely from early summer and the bottom one was made recently, late summer. Just beautiful and two different taste profiles!

I love scraping the wax off the frames. It's almost therapeutic.

Can you believe how dark this honey is? Some of the frames of honey was this really deep black coffee color! Now that is rich fall honey!

And when it starts flowing, oh my gosh. It smells incredible. Like you want to dunk your head in it!

A quick video to demonstrate what I mean. If only there was a smell app!

After we harvested the five frames of honey and split them up between the four of us (2 beehosts & 2 beekeepers) this is what each of us ended up taking home. 1 quart & 1 pint jar. This was the saddest harvest ever! But, at least we got a harvest.

I'm going to savor every last drop of this precious drop of my local Brooklyn honey!

Saturday, April 26, 2014

How to Raise Your Own Queen

Last weekend, we had another beehive inspection of our Brooklyn hives. When we arrived, there was lots of activity at the hives. I can watch this all day! It's so interesting!

The goal for this inspection was to see if we had successfully raised a new Queen. At our last inspection, we noticed that although the white hive survived the winter, the Queen in that hive did not. We had successfully raised Queens before in the past so we know we can do it.

We pulled some frames from the white hive and did not see the Queen so we had to find some freshly laid brood from our green hive and move it into our white hive in efforts to raise a new Queen.

This frame was full of bees, but the brood was all capped so this wasn't a good candidate.

A close up of some capped brood.

Video of looking for the brood frames.

On this frame, there was some freshly capped brood with some uncapped larvae. We pulled two frames like this and placed them into the white hive.

After placing the frames, we'll be back in a week to check on the hive to see if they make one of the larvae into a Queen. Since this hive is Queenless, they will feed a larvae royal jelly and make it into a Queen cup. When the Queen hatches, it will go for a mating flight and start laying. We're going to hope for the best! Wish us luck!

gardening in the boroughs of nyc

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Monday, October 13, 2014

Fall Honey Harvest 2014

Saturday, April 26, 2014

How to Raise Your Own Queen

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