Any bee keepers out there? I ran a search here and nothing. Just getting in to it. Theres plenty of info out there and the guy I get my nucs from has 50 years of experience but its good to ask around. We have two hives one is kicking ass put a super on bout 10 days ago and checked it today all frames are full of capped honey, added another box to it. The other hive is much slower its healthy but no honey yet.

Laidback on here has bees.

I have a few myself, just got into it this year.

Just got into it with one hive , double brood chamber , going to split next spring, have started making my own brood and super boxes. used to have 30 hives back in the 70's. and things have really changed since then.

Was around bees all my growing up years and took part in taking down several bee trees back then
Had a couple uncles that had over 200 hives each
I know absolutely nothing about them now and anyone nearby I could get advice from is dead now

Those are some nice looking pastel colored hives
I’ve only ever seen white ones

Those look strong. We’ll be harvesting our first batch this week.

Yep, you didn’t have to worry with small hive beetles or Varroa mites back then. Now if you don’t treat for Varroa mites your bees will die.

Great Pic's. If there's a Bear within 50 miles he will visit you. Hive clusters in FL require a multi-strand electric fence or you will get your heart broken.

We have bees. Quite a few of them and we caught another swarm on June 5. This one looks pretty small but it makes the 3rd swarm in that spot this year. We keep our bees at our farm which is about 35-40 minutes from the house. That turned out to be one of our best decisions. It takes a minute to convince yourself they know what they are doing. If you are a hobby beekeeper you have to realize you are not a commercial beekeeper and this allows you to do things a commercial keeper wouldn’t do because they can’t afford to.

My best advice is beekeeping is extremely local. We also treat our bees for mites. Currently we run 2 deeps and as many medium honey supers as they will fill. Most of our hives have 3 honey supers currently. We store our honey in 5 gallon buckets and bottle as we need to or sell the buckets to guys that make mead. That is a bigger market than you might expect. We sell for 1.00 an ounce.

I requeen 1/2 our hives in September and the other 1/2 in March every year. Unless I accidentally miss one or two. Manage mites, swarming, and hive beetles the rest is pretty easy.

Oh yeah you need as much equipment as you want to maintain. If you only want 4 hives then just keep 4. That might mean you sell nucs, give bees away, or just let them swarm. Don’t take the fun out of it.

One last thing always ask the guy that is giving you advice how many hives did they successfully winter over. Your goal should not be starting from scratch every year. We had a 20% loss last year. Believe it or not that is pretty good.

So as I mentioned we will be harvesting Friday for our first time, just one super. A neighbor beekeeper has a roller that decaps that hes going to let us use but I see that a lot of folks use a knife. We have a spinner, good food grade five gal bucket with a gate valve, and jars at the ready. The process will be a new deal for us. We plan to remove the super to the side, remove a frame and brush or shake off the bees to the brood box, then take the honey frames in for extraction.
Assumptions; Extracted frames go back in a super and back on the hive?
Once honey is extracted strain into bucket then fill jars.
Wax can be put in bucket, chopped up strained for more.
Can we jar right away or should we let it rest for a day to settle?
Im probably missing some steps here.

This is great information. I'm gonna get into this when I retire soon.

For one super this is what we would do. Take an extra empty super with you. Take super off hive and one by one shake the bees off the frame into the hive. Put that frame in empty super and cover the super with a towel. Repeat until you moved all frames. You don’t want frames that have unsealed nectar. A little bit unsealed is ok but very little to none is best. Get the honey away from your hives or your bees will try to recover the honey.

I would then use a leaf blower and blow out any surplus bees but not always. Set the super with the frames in a freezer for 48 hours +. Kills any eggs larvae, etc.. if you leave it longer it will be fine. Pull out of freezer 24 hours before you want to extract. With one super I would put it in my truck for an hour or so to get the honey warmed up before I decap and spin.

I let the honey settle in the extractor for about 30 minutes. I then drain from extractor into a 5 gal bucket. I use a paint strainer that is made for a bucket plus a single layer of cheese cloth. Then from bucket to bottle.

If you extract open cell honey the risk is it will ferment in the bottle, so don’t do it.

Set the super with frames out and your bees will clean it up for you. Clean all your equipment put it up for next year. Congratulations! Comb is gold don’t crush it and strain unless you have no other option.

Outstanding info!
I dont have a freezer big enough but I like the idea. Understand the moisture content, at least 80% capped, and ive seen guys on you tube use blowers so yes. Now the towel tip is a good one havnt seen that. “Comb is gold” kinda like tenderloins got it.
Thanks again

Went through my new hive to me today, double brood chamber, they had already swarmed once this year, getting ready to swarm again, tore up 9 new queen cells few looked like were ready to hatch, quite few drone and drone cells ready to hatch, overall they looked good , had 4 large frames full of caped hone, there was capped honey around the outer edges of lot of the frames, did see small eggs , did not see queen but was not looking for her being that i was putting powdered sugar on bees and with no help. My 24 dollar question is how soon should I go back through them to look for new queen cells ? I do not want them to swarm again this year

My suggestion is always leave one or two queen cells. If they are ready to swarm you can always be too late to stop them. By leaving a queen cell behind they may swarm with your mated queen, the virgin queen or maybe not swarm at all. But in those situations you still have a queen. You crush all the cells and if they swarm with only queen….well you need a queen.

To answer your question. Check every other day. Also if you have an empty super of any size add it to give them some room. They swarm because they need to. Not enough room, too many parasites, etc…. It is what they are supposed to do, you are trying ( like all of us ) to manipulate them into not swarming.

I have a hive that has a great Queen and very calm bees I wanted to take splits from. About a month ago I found 1/2 dozen queen cells ended up making a split with the queen and made 2 more splits with with Queen cells and left a few queen cells in the original hive. Only one of the splits didn’t work out. My goal this year is to really grow my hives and work on overwintering nucs, I plan on overwintering 30 nucs

We just got done with our first harvest, had eight frames and got 25 lbs. I see more hives in our future.

Great job! Your own honey is always the best.