Spring honey

Pulled some honey off one of my hives Sunday.

Nice ! what kind is it. ? My girls are filling a deep super with spring honey here. I hope I get to steal some. They usually feed it all to brood. Fireweed is our main flow.

Matt, that looks perfect for buttered biscuits.

I have a question for you as a beekeeper, today along a 35 mile stretch of highway I passed 8 separate bunches of hives. The furthest group may have been 30 yards from the road, the posted speed limit is 70 and I was driving a bit under. As I passed the hives it was like tracer bullets coming at me and at 10 plus bees would have hit my windshield at each hive village. A lot of traffic drives this road and many semis exceeding the speed limit. Seems like to me after a week there would be no bees left from road casualties. Do you see any logic for hives to be that close to the road and have so many bees lost? I felt bad about the ones that made contact with my windshield.
How fast do honey bees reproduce?

Up to 1500 eggs laid per day.

Pulled honey last week. Some of the best I've tasted in years. If I had to posit a guess I'd say mostly locust blended with blackberry.

Wow thats a lot of honey! Is that an above average haul for one hive?

Looks like forty 1lb jars. That's below average in my area. I expect 60lb per minimum. 5 gallons honey is 60lbs.
If I hauled them to the mountains after the flow is done here I'd expect another 60 per.

Sweet!! I know of two places bears have raided the hives and destroyed most everything. The keepers are putting up electric fences to try to keep them out but now that the secrets out I don't know if even that'll work. A lot of work goes into making honey but man is it ever worth it!

Honey bees. They make the world go round. My favorite ....

44 1lb it's what they had capped in the top deep, there is another 6 wet frames that I left. I figure to get 40 or 50 pounds of this hive. I gave happy with what I got. Especially with all the rainy days that we have had that make it hard for the bees to fly.

I dont know for sure what all the have in there but they are on about 7 acre of clover, yellow hop and vetch. It been a wet spring so everything has bloomed.

That does seem kinda close but I am surprised the bees dont go up higher, they adapt pretty quick.

Why would it taste different than past years? Honey is honey. Tastes the same every time I have it.

We robbed ours Saturday, some of the best we've had in years because the locust bloom was great this year. Got 60 quarts off of the 7 hives we robbed still have 30 jives untouched so it's going to be a good year. That looks great Matt and real consistent color. We had 3 different colors from the locust, cherry and tulip popular they were working

Do you ever put comb in your jars, all the honey that my uncle sells to the summer residents(Floridians) he puts comb in it, they seem to buy it better

lol will be all differnt kinds of honey in the same super some times.
maybe your taster is broke or your buying the karo syrup blended honey that i hate to even see for sale.

I wish it would stop raining long enough to let my bees make a little honey.

I am running wood frames with rite cell foundation so I can't get comb in my honey. I won't to get some just wood frames and try to get them to draw that out so I can put comb in with some honey. I like the darker fall honey better then the lighter spring. The dark has a stronger taste to me.

Honey is like wine with different flavors depending on the source of the nectar and that influenced by the soil and weather. Not just the taste but color and aroma as well as texture. Some honeys like basswood are water white while buckwheat or poplar are dark. Some will granulate or candy quickly like canola or aster while tupelo never will. Flavors range from mild and to wild.
I have one small jar of bitterweed honey given to me. To look at it it is an almost perfect honey being bright golden yellow that has yet to granulate in the ten years I've had it but to taste it is an experience. The best I can describe it is industrial solvent, it strongly reminds me of hoppes #9.
Honey can also be toxic or hallucinagenic as in rhododendron or medicinal as in monuka.

That's called chunk honey and it is in demand in most areas. I know I keep getting requests for it. I started to make some this year but didn't get around to making up cut comb supers in time.

Thanks Warrior, for the explanation. I love good quality pure honey.

People laugh at me until they see my track record...I don’t have allergies or get sick. I eat local honey daily. Whether it’s on something or 2 tablespoons straight outa the jug. I even use it as a sweetener. I’ve even had some shipped from other states I hunt. Seen my buddies hit the Midwest during Spring turkey season and all of a sudden be congested as all get out...I’ll be just fine. It may be all in my head, but I truly believe honey helps.

I give a guy a few bottles a year that eats 1 table spoon a day and swears he has no allergies now.

nice work!!

Send it all to me. Lol My guy is out and it will be a month. Stopped using Sugar months ago and switched to honey.

Thanks warrior! I’m tempted to buy some different honeys now to taste test!

We built and powdercoated a trail for a guy who has a lot of hives and he brought every one at work a bottle of honey to say thanks. I didn't think much of it and didn't taste it till a few weeks later, it was the best honey I had ever had. Tastes like oranges, I couldn't believe it.

I got some bitterweed going cheap. LOL

You got to try tupelo, the real tupelo the Florida panhandle. It tastes like butter.

I like Manuka honey. I also like thistle honey.

The one I want to try is heather honey from the Scottish highlands. It's thixotropic or a solid at rest but a liquid when stirred. You cannot pour this honey from a jar unless you stir it well first. It can not be extracted from the comb via conventional means it must be pressed from the comb.

How do you go about getting some of that?

Every one kills the thistle around me so it's hard to get that in the hive.

Order online.

Locust honey is my favorite here, but I haven't tastes any I didn't like in the 30+ years we've had bees on our farm

Do y'all have just langstroth hives or do you have some top bar too. I am wanting to try the top bar mostly for honey comb and just because I like to try new things.

Yea Matt we have some top bar, I'll try to take some pics later and post. My uncle has always built all of ours, but most are langsworth style

Nice! Yes please get pics. I like seeing how other are set up.

Nothing but bad luck this year. Purchased a package of bee mid April. Nice queen but two weeks later no egg and no queen. Purchased a queen put her in with the bee still in the cage and the next day dead. I went to the Amish dealer where I got the queen and he had none left so he gave me a frame of bees with fresh eggs in hopes they would make a queen. no luck. Do have a laying worker so plenty of drones just no queen yet. So there goes $120.00 down the drain. What to do NOW? Any suggestions?

Combine with a strong queenright colony. This is why it's best to start with two colonies.
Laying worker can be corrected but by time is all said and done you're better off taking your loss and doing the combine.

To turn it around you need open brood as open brood produces pheromones that work in conjunction with queen pheromone to keep workers ovaries suppressed. Each week take the laying worker colony 200-300 feet away and shake out every bee. This is an attempt to separate the laying workers (note plural) which supposedly are not flighted while the rest fly home. Return the hive to it's original location and add at least one frame of open brood. Repeat weekly until they draw a queen cell with provided brood frame.

I've turned a few around over the years this way but almost invariably I've done so by stripping other colonies of brood while the one I'm tryin save ends up to weak to be worth saving.

My first package swarmed and turned into a laying worker. I had a laying queen shipped in but it was too late. They did accept her but she wouldn't lay and absconded two weeks later.

All those drones are full of mites I bet. I dont think I would even combine them if it ever happened to me again.

Its not a total loss you have comb and that's gold. Still enough time to restart a Nuc or package if you can find it. Don't beat yourself up too bad. Beekeeping is very hard to jump into without a mentor, but it does get easier as you gain more experience.

Good luck.