0/10. Would not recommend.

Well, last week I said that things could be worse.  Apparently, the universe took that as a challenge.  Today was one of those days where I ask myself "Why did I think that beekeeping was a good idea again?"

I woke up excited because today was going to be honey-spinning day.  The weather wasn't cooperating, so I suited up in full gear and headed out between rainstorms.  I started at the outyard.  I only had supers on the hive sitting in the new stand.  I open it up to an odd smell.  Small hive beetles had slimed every frame in my super!  That's odd.  That hive had been doing really well prior to my putting supers on it.  It appears that they had done so well that they decided to swarm.  Four weeks ago if I had to guess.  And the virgin never made it back (that's par for the course this year).  This is totally my fault.  I assumed that because they were the queenless half of the split from early April and that they had plenty of room in the supers that their swarm impulse would be quashed.  I was wrong.

Right now, the plan is to remove all of the slimed frames and clean them out.  I'll probably just shake the bees out.  Then I'll move one of the nucs from the backyard to that place and feed them until Goldenrod starts.  I'll treat the area around both of the outyard hives with Gardstar to keep the problem from spreading to the other hive because it's got a queen, but she's not kicking ass.

That brings us to the orange hive in the backyard.  They were not happy to see me.  They were even less happy with me when I started pulling frames of honey.  I ended up having to add a second bee jacket on top of the one I was wearing because they managed to get through the first one.  they landed about a dozen stings, including two on my ear from some determined girls that managed to make it inside my veil.  It wasn't pretty.  They surprised me by filling out one full super of honey (less the two frames that they decided to turn into brood comb) and making a good effort on a second one.  I got 12 frames of honey from them and gave them 6 frames back, on top of a queen excluder, to finish curing.  Next time they will get a bee escape.

See all the stingers?  I probably took a couple of hundred stings with about a dozen getting through.

More stingers

Their population is massive.  So much so that I'm afraid of a swarm.  We're in a dearth, so I hope that will prevent it until I can do something about it.  I think that I'll pull them into a nuc to replace the one that's going to replace the slimed hive in the outyard.  I had planned on isolating their queen for mite control today, but that's on hold for now.  I still have to treat the light green hive with OAV tonight.  I need to get my jackets in the wash before I do that.

It's still draining, but it looks like I'm going to get between
3.5 and 4 gallons.  Not bad for one hive.  

But then it was time to extract.  I got to use my new toy.  It took five or six frames to really get the hang of cutting off the cappings.  I can really see how using a nine frame setup with the correct spacing would make life easier when it comes to decapping frames for extracting.  I think we'll give that a try next year.