The Good, the Bad, and the--well, you know the rest

First the good!  We've had two harvests so far this year, with about 60 lbs. of honey the first time, in early July, and this week another 100 lbs.  The fall honey was darker, but still very sweet.  We extracted 29 frames this harvest and returned a number of frames to the hives that just weren't quite "cured" yet and didn't want to add that higher moisture honey into the mix.  We'll see if we get a goldenrod harvest but I think this honey will just be placed down into the hives to help prepare for winter.
Currently, we have 5 hives (I combined the swarm hive with one of my splits that just didn't take off quite as well as the others.)  We put the queen from the split hive into a nuc.  Now that honey supers are mostly off, I'll get in and take a look to make sure we have a queen in each going into fall.  From the numbers of bees hanging around on warm days, I think we are good with queens in each hive.

Now for the bad.  De-capping the frames, Kathy found a small beetle.  It was alive and active.  Right away she suspected small hive beetle, and researching it we are very confident that our identification is correct, unfortunately.


I right away have ordered beetle traps.  My guess is they came from the package I got that originated from Georgia.  I really should have thought about that before accepting the hive.  I'm afraid this is now going to be one more problem to have to deal with.  I think the key will be to keep the hives strong, and perhaps look into doing some physical barriers like I've seen on the web.  We'll keep fingers crossed and meanwhile try to figure out what to do with all this honey.  That's a good problem.



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