Oh my word.....we got out and pulled frames of honey from 2 of our 5 hives. This is the 1st time we have ever done this (and we are VERY excited), but it is hard work!! We currently have 5 hives, but have been feeding sugar syrup to 2 of these hives. (1 was a swarm we caught, the other was a nuc we purchased and received in April) Although the bees make "honey" out of the sugar syrup, it is not "real" honey, so you cannot package that and sell it. Ethically, anyway. We ended up with 14 frames of honey from the 2 Russian hives we have. We were told last year when we purchased the Russians (after having almost lost everything) that Russians are a bit more aggressive, but are strong bees and excellent honey producers. They have proven this to be true! If you remember, we split this hive earlier this year. We really weren't expecting much since we had split them. These girls are monsters though! Wow, do they work hard! We pulled 3 frames off the hive where the queen hatched. (I also got a great picture of this beauty I will share later!) The other 11 frames we got from this queen's mama and her hive. All this honey, and we left them plenty! We also checked our hive with the Hawaiian queen. We will probably get about 8 frames of honey from them, they just didn't have it all capped yet. I'll have to do a post on the honey making process....these bees are really amazing creatures! We've been told to expect 2 1/2 pounds of honey from each shallow frame. I'll let you all know how much we end up with and share some pictures from the extracting process.
