So....How was your year?

[justin]

well this post has been shaming me everytime i skip it. i started the year with 4 hives (no winter losses) and feeding. one swarmed mid june putting me at 5. late june i bought 45 hives from a retiring beek, i also split my strongest hive hoping to prevent a swarm.51 hives first of july. great clover bloom followed by great knapweed bloom, the hives i had bought were not real strong, but a few were getting their 3rd super and all had at least one.things still looked good at the beginning of august, 2 days of rain to keep the knapweed blooming, and the yellowjackets did not seem to be a problem so far. mid august my wifes best friend (who was staying with us) went off the mountain in our car and was killed. did not make it into the yard for 8 days. when i did get to the yard 8 hives were completely dead, full of yellowjackets and robbed empty. of my original hives the split and the swarm i had captured were dead, 4 more died in the following week as i was screening, and taping, and sometimes even moving hives. it was not a usual thing, no one had seen yellowjackets like this here. on the jobsite everyone was getting stung, the kids were getting stung everywhere they went, it really caught me off guard. i put over 20 robbed out supers back in the shed(mediums). after combining hives for winter i have 32 hives and i am not confident in all those. i got 60 gallons of honey which is really lousy even with my final hive count, although right now i am selling it in a local holiday market for retail prices and getting a ton of positive feed back from the whole town which makes me feel a little better. i am chomping at the bit for next year, wanting to do things right.

[justin]

i don't like having the last word. justin

[Hambone]

We are not done with the thread yet. I haven't had the chance to read all the responses yet. I will be replying to those.

There ya go buddy. I got the last word for now.

[MikeJ]

First year.
June, July, August combined had about 30 days of no rain, not days with sun necessarily just no rain. Temps hardly getting into the 50s. Late August - early September finally the weather changed and temps went up and skies cleared,

2 Hives from packages.
1 has done very well. Grew to a very large size. Rain kept me out of the hive to long and I found them on the verge of swarming. My split was to late and to small. They swarmed but I caught it. Recombined in autumm. Plenty of stores... still feeding as insurance.
When the weather got better they made honey but I only took a little that was stored in comb I had to cut out.

Other hive grew slow and had problems. When it finally was getting to size it swarmed and it got away. The weather has been very bad this sumer.

Next year if God wills it will be better.

Wasn't a total loss I guess. I kept records and track of blooms too. Maybe next year will be able to plan ahead.

Mike

[Wee3Bees]

Justin,

That is terrible about your wife's best friend. Sounds like a tough year so far...

[Gene Weitzel]

Went into the last winter with about 80 colonies, 74 survived. Things looked really good early on with an incredible blackberry flow in my home yard so I thought that by the time the Tallow hit we would be in tall cotton. Due to drought the Tallow only lasted about 2 weeks instead of its normal 4 to 6 weeks. Was still able to harvest an avg of 60 lbs of honey each off 60 colonies. Fortunately we were able to separate our blackberry and tupelo (yes, tupelo in Texas!) which we sell at $7.50 per lb. That kind of made up for the lower total volume. Split about 45 hives after the flow and added colonies from cutouts/swarms to increase the count to 100+. Fall flow was cut short by October's deluge (thank goodness for El Nino) so it looks like I will have to do a little feeding (maybe about 20% of the colonies).

[NasalSponge]

Started out this spring with two 5 frame nucs, caught two swarms, and thought I was moving a queen cell into a nuc, turns out I moved my marked queen so I got to deal with a laying worker colony but it was good experience and have a beautiful open mated queen in there. The two swarms wouldn't build and started getting mean so I pinched the queens and combined with the open mated queen. So I now have 3 strong hives. I pulled 1 quart of honey off one for my wife. Caught my first site of the notorious SHB so I ordered traps today. All in all a good starter year.

[kwest]

i got my first 2 packages in may. split one they attempted to make a queen. the queen cells failed? ordered two queens putting one queen in my split and i made a second split and put the other queen in. now i have 3 strong hives the 4th is one full deep packed with bees. i took off 2 gallons of honey from them. everything seemed light so i fed like a mad man and hope they make it.

[WI-beek]

Honey harvest sucked. This whole year was cold and windy here in my part of Wisconsin. I had an amazing blackberry flow this spring that caused swarming. My stupidity was to blame. The rest of the season was to cold for good nectar flow and to windy for the bees to get much accomplished. It was dry to top it off half the summer. I am pretty knew to beekeeping and a life long commercial beek told me this may be the worst year for honey they have ever had. This October was the coldest on record last time I heard for in my location. Many beekeepers were not able to treat there bees because it was to cold by the time they would normally do it. Many have also found themselves unable to get there bees up to par for winter after they have ate all the honey they did make this summer to feed themselves and brood. Rul of thumb here is to have your bees feed for winter and treatments finished by october 15th to be safe. This year you have had to bee done by september 20th or so.

I think I will be OK though. If I had started treatments and feeding one week later I would be screwed.

[raosmun]

DITTO!! Sounds just like the season I had in NW Ohio!! Cold wet spring, hot very dry summer and a misserable October.
Now November and haven't taken any honey off yet or opened the hives for over a month, weather!! The little critters are eating me out of house & home!!
It forcasted to be in the mid upper 60s this weekend and sunny. If so, is it too later to harvest or just let things go untill spring