🐝💗Our Backyard Beekeeping Journey!💗🐝

[5Australorpasaures]

Doing a Mite chk today as it leaves me time to treat with the Apivar strips before our fall flow. Would rather use Formic Pro but with temps going into the 90sF again I can't.

 

[Sally PB]

Long winded questions here...

We got our first honey harvest this last June. Yay! The hive is set up as: 2 deeps, queen excluder (QE), deep for honey. They are filling the honey super with honey again, and we think it'll be capped and ready in a week or two, so we'll harvest it then. We'll give them those frames back and figure that anything else they make is theirs for the winter.

Question 1: Do we take off the QE to give them more room to build up for the winter?

This hive swarmed several weeks ago, but if I hadn't seen the swarm, we wouldn't have been able to tell when we checked inside. Our hives are 8 frame boxes, and three deep boxes is as high as we want to go, for ease of lifting and inspections, so I'm thinking we don't want to remove the QE. Hubby isn't sure.

Question 2:If we do remove it, how do we turn that box into a honey super next year? That might not be how I should phrase the question, but we want to stay with three deeps, total, for height.

We did not look into the brood boxes. Hubby was having issues with his back. He said he wasn't lifting anything heavier than a frame.

I can see why one of our club members runs all medium boxes! They get HEAVY!