Harvested some honey today. Been a strange summer weather-wise here, lots of rain during the spring when the main bee nectar source, Tulip Poplar, was in bloom. I had almost no honey in my upper boxes as I would have expected. In fact, in one of my hives, the bees carried eggs/larva up INTO the honey supers where they aren't supposed to be and are trying to hatch a queen there.
I did pull a little honey from the honey supers, but decided to look through my brood boxes (where typically, all of the queen egg-laying is going on and where you don't usually pull honey frames from - since this is the honey they will rely on through the fall/winter). I was surprised to find that almost all of my top brood boxes were full of frames of honey, and only honey. They call this 'honey bound' as the honey occupies so much space that there's no where for the queen to lay eggs. It can actually kill the hive because bees only live a month or two, and this time of year the queen needs to be laying fall and winter bees.
So I pulled a couple full frames from all 3 good hives. I thought I have 4 good hives until today, when I found one of my four abandoned and totally taken over by wax moths. You never know what to expect with bees, that's for sure.
Anyway, I have several gallons of honey I am processing. That's never a bad thing.
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