# Harvesting questions



## farmnewbie (Apr 18, 2014)

So today I went to harvest my first honey of the season and of course I have some questions. First off I did not use a queen excluder. Well when I first put the supers on I did and the bees wanted nothing to do with it so a week later I took it off. Another week later they had it all drawn out beautifully and a couple weeks after that I have fully capped honey ready to be harvested. Now when I pulled the frames there were some drone cells on the bottom of some of the frames and they indeed had capped drones in them. What is one to do? I have 8 frame equipment and I ended up only taking 4 frames and a couple of the frames had a few capped drone brood but I figured I would take it anyway. We made sure the queen was not on any of the frames before we cleared them if bees (I hope) lol. So question being, do I put a queen excluder on now, then wait till the drones hatch then harvest the rest of the honey? Or do I do what I did and just harvest even with the little bit of drone brood is in there? 
I got 18 little 8oz jelly mason jars of honey though out of 4 frames!! That's awesome! I'm pretty excited. Also after I extracted, I just put the frames right
back into the hive. The bees will clean it up and repair all the comb right? The comb was pretty beat up by the time we were done with it. Is that pretty normal? Oh and I don't have an uncapping knife do I just used a kitchen knife but then I found in my box of stuff I bought there is a roller thingy that looks like a single wheel uncapping roller. Any thoughts on those? 
Ok sorry this was so long and so many questions!! Thanks for all your help!!
~Jeni 
help!


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## farmnewbie (Apr 18, 2014)

Haha. That last help  was not suppose to be there. 
Oh one more question. How of you know what "type" of honey you have. And how much does a jar of raw honey typically sell for? 
Here is a pic


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## GeoCitizen (Feb 24, 2014)

I previously used just a normal serrated kitchen knife. Last year I bought a little three inch wide roller tool with spikes that poke through the top of the cap. I love it. It does a lot less damage to the comb so they have less to repair when you reuse it.

I don't use a queen excluder. When I have some brood on the frames I do one of two things. If the brood is a very small number of cells I uncap and pull the larvae out with a toothpick. I look for varroa while I'm at it. If there's lots of capped brood I just wait for it to hatch and harvest the frame with some empty cells. If the newly open cells is more than 25% I just leave it and let the bees fill it. I'm rarely in a hurry to harvest since I don't do this for a business.

Its starting to get late in the season, so don't harvest so much honey you have to invest all your profits in sugar to feed them late in October so they have enough for the winter. Anything I harvest from now to the winter goes in my freezer (frame and all). If fall is wet and cold and they don't have enough food, I thaw the frames and put them back in after they reach ambient temperature. This works for me because I don't have dozens of hives. Plus a half empty deep freeze now that the kids are out of the house helps as well!

Using sugar water to build up the food reserves in late fall should be a last resort. It lacks the nutritional content bees need to thrive in the winter. Sugar honey will give them energy, but it won't truly feed their biological needs. You could live on sugar too, but your health will decline. Don't get greedy during the fall harvest. You can always harvest it in the spring!

One last thought. You didn't say where you live. Fall last longer the further south you live. I spoke to a beekeeper from Arizona. Her bees forage 10 months a year. Mine forage 6 months at the most! That means 6 months of food storage!


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## farmnewbie (Apr 18, 2014)

Ok great info. Maybe I should just leave what is left then for the rest of the season and harvest in spring. I want to make sure they have enough but I thought from my understanding that they will have all they need in the deep boxes for the winter and they don't need extra honey in the supers for winter? Maybe I'm wrong. First year and I've got lots to learn! I am in northern Illinois so yeah not a lot of time left till the cold weather hits. 
I'm also not in a huge hurry to get a bunch of honey. It's just for us and whatever we don't use we will sell or give away to friends and family. I was just excited to get some out of my hive for the very first time. I have only 2 hives and one isn't doing as well as the other. They don't even have a honey super on yet. 
Oh and that's a great idea of checking the brood for mites! I didn't even think of that. I will do that next time I pull one, if I harvest more at all. I was thinking if anything I would harvest the remaining 4 frames that I didn't harvest today and then leave them alone until spring. 
Thanks again!


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## alleyyooper (Apr 22, 2005)

I at first would normally make sure the queen wasn't in the super and add a excluder to allow the bees to hatch then take the honey. As we got more and more colony's I would put the frames with the brood in a empty box and then put them on a colony that was on the weak side. the brood would hatch building the hive up and the bees would rob the honey to put in the deeps. I never take honey off after Sept 1st. It is all off by that time and any they collect from Golden Rod and Asters is theirs.

Get a bowl of hot water to put your knife in it to heat it up to make uncapping easier and doing less damage to the comb. Putting the frames back on the hives is a good thing to dry them out and clean them up.

 Al


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