I have ten hives, check them all and every one of them, there feeder board were load with bees looking for food, so I made up food for them, I will check with tomorrow and see if there any more happier.
James and I have extracted our honey on 4 hives. Tons of bees and beautiful capped brood patterns in the hives. He down sized to 2 brood boxes. I have left my Layens hive as is. The most interesting part was my hive in town was at 17% and his hives were 15.5%. Beautiful distinct flavors and creamy buttery textures but different flavors of course. We ended up with 18 gallons. We left plenty reserves on each hive. No sign of varroa mites.
I drawed most of my honey frames last week, during extracting my honey I noticed a few of the frames showed where some of the bees was already using their cap honey.
I also kept my honey supers on hoping that I might get some more cap honey by the end of September.
What I should be doing is giving them some of the protein mix that I made-up last year, let them eat this instead of their honey. This would be one choice the other choice would be to reduce you're hives down to two deeps with a feeder board forcing your bees to downsize before they devour all their winter honey.
Rick
I've had the same thing. Since the knotweed seems to have awhile to go yet the ending to the story is not written. I, too, have had a massive amount of bees in the super. Perhaps they are starting to move it down to the deeps.
My hives have way too many bees and are definitely more aggressive than I have ever seen them. Smoke doesn't seem to phase them. I wish I split them a month ago.
I also had a bizarre experience. One of my marked, hygienic Starr Farms queens was doing a deep dive head first into cell after cell after cell after cell. I've never seen a queen do that. I asked Dewey but he didn't know why. Supposedly they measure the cell with their front legs to determine whether to lay a drone or a worker but he's not sure why they would go head first all the way to the bottom of the cell. I'll have to check in a few days to see that she's laying eggs and replace her if she isn't. I actually dread it because they are so "defensive".
I only have 6 summers of beekeeping to compare, but for some strange reason, this summer is weird.
I pulled 100 lbs of honey off of 4 amazingly strong hives in mid July. 3 or 4 weeks ago, I noted that all 4 hives were strong and building a ton more honey. Each hive had 2 supers on, and each supper was about half full of honey the 1st week of August. No one frame was full, but almost every frame was anywhere from 30 to 60 percent full.
Yesterday, I planned on pulling the supers off in preparation for winter. My thought was that any Knot Weed honey they would bring in during September would be stored in their deep boxes setting them up for a great winter.
I was totally surprised when I open things up. Every super was down to about 10 to 20% full. Every hive was strong (very strong) with bees. The queen was laying good patterns of larva, and the bees were hugely busy in the supers as well as in the deep boxes. I have never seen so many bees in the supers before. I mean thousands of bees in the supers. The deeps were full as well. I have not noticed any robbing and my hive entrances are all reduced to 3 inches.
On a side note, I bumped into Paige Andrus at the Post Office the other day and she told me a similar story. Her analysis was that the bees were hungry and had already eaten all their honey. Suggesting that August was a dearth and they had nothing else to eat.
Have any of you had similar experience? Do any of you have ideas as to what is going on?