White Queen & Impatiently Waiting for Honey

I've been pretty busy the past several weekends and haven't had the opportunity to inspect my bees. However, I've been prepping the "honey house" aka the unfinished basement. I know that I've got at least one full medium super of capped honey. This means that the bees have placed a layer or "capping" of wax over the honey to keep the honey from either absorbing more water or from evaporating down further. When honey is capped like this, then it is usually safe to extract. You see honey that is more than 18.6% water will ferment. The bottle of honey will go bad and the bottle can even burst. That would be a shame and a sticky mess. Bees must have a way of knowing when, generally, the honey is safe to cap and that it is sufficiently evaporated down. This fermentation risk, because honey is hygroscopic, meaning that it absorbs water from the air, is also a reason why it can be important to extract your honey quickly after removing supers and perhaps even having a de-humidifier running while extracting. Interestingly, because honey is hygroscopic, if you use honey as a substitute sweetener in baked goods, you can use less liquid in the batter and the outcome will be that the cookies or whatever you made will not dry out as fast as it would if honey was not used.

Anyway, this medium super of mine that has capped honey is likely to hold close to 30 lbs. of honey. When I last inspected I checked my second medium super and found that it too is full of honey and curing nectar. The second super's frames are capped at the top 1/3. The bottom 2/3rds is nectar that is still curing and being evaporated and is not yet capped. So, this means that the extracting weekend is being moved out to probably the second weekend in September. This is tentative and depends on the bees' progress on this super over the next week or so. I'm thinking that it should be ready by then, because when I was inspecting these frames the nectar didn't run out when the frame was upside down, and so the curing process is fairly advanced already.

I was pretty proud of myself during my last inspection, as I was able to find the queen fairly rapidly. The white marking (which stands for queens introduced in years ending in 1) was starting to come off, and so I brought along a white marking pen and a small push in queen marking cage. I didn't want to have to pick up the queen because I was wearing my beekeeping gloves and was afraid that I might squish her accidentally. I've had 3 stings on the hands this season and the swelling hurts. Perhaps this is because I didn't take any Benadryl or use any ice (which when I get stung again, I will definitely be using). So I was being somewhat cautious. Next time I will try inspecting again without the gloves. The queen kept moving throughout the marking cage and so it was still somewhat tricky to get a decent dab on her thorax; but I was able to. This should mean continued ease in finding the queen. It also meant that despite the queen cells I've found at the bottom of frames, the bees have never swarmed.

However, I have noticed that my bees crowd to one side of the hive. I don't know why the brood ended up concentrated on the side of the hive rather than in the middle. My next inspection will involve me manipulating brood frames to place the brood more centrally in the hive. I definitely don't want them hugging the side as they go in to winter.

Good luck with your bees! Here is my hive with 3 supers (2 mediums and 1 shallow) and 2 deeps below. The bees get everything in the deeps. I'll get everything in the supers. My goals was at least 30 lbs. of honey this year. Looks like my bees will be surpassing that goal!