Man plans and God laughs
My summer was pretty much a blur. I managed to mostly follow the plan that I outlined in How to maximize your honey production while minimizing swarming (Part II). I am very grateful that I had this plan, because in the swirl of my day-to-day responsibilities, I did not have much time to putter in the hives and try out new things. I had a target date, manipulations that needed done and that was that.
I am happy to report that I ended up with 10 5 gallon extracted honey buckets from my 5 hives that survived the polar vortex. I ended up leaving 2 full deep supers on 2 of those hives since couple of the middle frames had some unhatched drone brood and I did not have the time to try to move those further down. I also distributed a full supper among my new spring packages to make sure they have adequate supplies for winter.
Overall, I am happy with the results even though I did not have the time to grow my apiary the way I planned to. Over the next few weeks, I will be posting some more details and pictures! from my beekeeping summer.
Now, the only thing left to do is to make sure they are protected for the winter.
