# How to make a lot of honey



## Briarvalleyapiaries (Feb 26, 2015)

This year my goal is to make as much honey as possible. Do you have any tips for how to make a lot of honey. I have 17 colonies that I'm sending into winter.


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## johnbeejohn (Jun 30, 2013)

Keep them as strong as possible feed in early spring would help
Don't let them swarm
Have drawn supers


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## max2 (Dec 24, 2009)

Briarvalleyapiaries said:


> This year my goal is to make as much honey as possible. Do you have any tips for how to make a lot of honey. I have 17 colonies that I'm sending into winter.


Please let me know when you find out.
Do you take membership for the little Keith fan club? He is great!


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## Norcalkyle (Apr 23, 2015)

More bees = more honey. Give them space and stop swarming


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## Ian (Jan 16, 2003)

Look into running double or triple queen hives. Mid season confine the queens in their separate units under an excluder and allow the bees to mingle and share storage space uptop. 
It keeps honey out of the broodnest and pushes it all up top, and with the combined populations these units will maximize their house and field fources

In a lot of cases the simple equation of more bees = more honey does not pan out, swarming is the great equalizer
I work it from the other perspective, smaller younger together = more honey


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## sakhoney (Apr 3, 2016)

Ian is spot on - double queens - lots of brood = lots of honey


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## GaSteve (Apr 28, 2004)

For folks who run multiple queens as Ian described, are top entrances necessary or beneficial to reduce traffic through the excluder or will that lead to a lot of pollen in the supers?

What is the preferred excluder type - flat metal, woodbound metal, plastic, or does it matter?


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## Ian (Jan 16, 2003)

I don't think much about reducing bee traffic through the excluders 
Be sure to use an excluder which separated the queens. No access In between


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## Briarvalleyapiaries (Feb 26, 2015)

Ive heard that if I cage the queen for a few days during the honey flow the bees will make more honey because they can spend all of their energy on making honey instead of raising brood. Is this true or is this not a recommended tactic.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

No open or cap broods, lots of bees with unlimited supers for honey storage on a strong flow.
Caging the queen will not work for a few days when there are broods to be tend to.


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## Ravenseye (Apr 2, 2006)

Briarvalleyapiaries said:


> Ive heard that if I cage the queen for a few days during the honey flow the bees will make more honey because they can spend all of their energy on making honey instead of raising brood. Is this true or is this not a recommended tactic.


I wouldn't look at it like that. Caging her for a few days means that she just won't lay a few days of eggs. It will ultimately have a very small effect on the total population. If she's been actively laying up to that point there will be brood to take care of since worker bee brood gets capped about the 9 or 10 day old mark. Moreover, young bees (those bees that are a day to a few weeks old) are nurse and house bees and may not have started foraging yet. 

A hive with no brood means that no effort is being made to care for brood and thus, attention may be shifted to other tasks....like foraging. For this to work, you need a queen caged longer AFTER the colony is built up so that you have the vast majority of your booming colony focused on foraging. AND, you need a flow from which to harvest the nectar. AND you need space for storage (don't underestimate how dramatically fast a strong colony, on a strong flow can pull wax and / or fill foundation). AND you can expect a precipitous decline in the population since nothing except predation or poison will shorten the lifespan of your workers more than heavy foraging. To help re-establish a forage colony, you can add brood frames (with all their nurse bees) from a donor colony (mixed brood stages help to smooth the rebuild curve) and release the queen you caged. Let them rebound. There's no need to feed since they're cupboard is full. Watch for laying activity while your queen gets back into her routine. It's easy to assume that a tall hive with lots of flying bees is doing well until it no longer isn't.


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## photobiker (Mar 23, 2015)

I find this intriguing and maybe something maybe worth trying. Reading some of the post from the past shed some light on the positives and negatives. I guess additional honey is the only positive and the negatives are that you need to inspect frequently to make sure you still have 2 queens and you will need to break the hive back into 2 hives after the main flow, I guessing that part. And timing seems to be real important.

A setup with 2-10 frame boxes side by side with a 10 frame supers centered would get the most brood area. A setup with 2 nucs side by side with 10 frame supers on top would reduce the brood area but might be easier to inspect. Do you need 10 frames for each queen to lay in or will 5 frames be enough to generate the bee population you are trying to attain? In either case it seems it would be beneficial to cut a queen excluder in half to make inspection easier. I don't know if it is an advantage but I could put a divider in a 10 frame box so that everything is the same size, if 5 frames in enough. 

If I remember you need to do this +/- 3 weeks prior to the main flow. If using new queens I guess you need to allow another couple of weeks for mating and getting started. Over wintered queens would be best but just looking at all angles.


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## Ravenseye (Apr 2, 2006)

photobiker said:


> If I remember you need to do this +/- 3 weeks prior to the main flow. If using new queens I guess you need to allow another couple of weeks for mating and getting started. Over wintered queens would be best but just looking at all angles.


Your timing is about right. If your queens are already mated you don't have to worry about that part but about 3 weeks is good anyway.


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## gww (Feb 14, 2015)

Abby warre, doolittle and mel disekoen seem to suggest that keeping the queen but getting rid of the brood is the way to make honey.

My only experiance is from reading but I throw that out there anyway.
Cheers
gww


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## Ravenseye (Apr 2, 2006)

gww said:


> Abby warre, doolittle and mel disekoen seem to suggest that keeping the queen but getting rid of the brood is the way to make honey.
> 
> My only experiance is from reading but I throw that out there anyway.
> Cheers
> gww


Good point. I think the key is to create less work for house bees, allowing them to forage. I can see how a free queen in a broodless hive can also smooth out the population over time.


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## Ian (Jan 16, 2003)

It's a fantastic way to clog up your brood nest with honey and pollen
Let her do her thing


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## clyderoad (Jun 10, 2012)

gww said:


> Abby warre, doolittle and mel disekoen seem to suggest that keeping the queen but getting rid of the brood is the way to make honey.
> 
> My only experiance is from reading but I throw that out there anyway.
> Cheers
> gww


and just as important is it's use as a swarm control measure.


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## Michael Palmer (Dec 29, 2006)

Ian said:


> It's a fantastic way to clog up your brood nest with honey and pollen
> Let her do her thing


I agree


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>Do you have any tips for how to make a lot of honey. 

Get the population to peak right at the main flow.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

Now is the time to harvest some pollen for your pollen subs later on.
Don't forget to use the pollen traps. It is all honey you want not the pollen in the
comb. Extract often when the frames are all filled up and cap. Hope you have plenty of
drawn comb on hand to super up early on. Spring is just around the corner here. They're out
for the early blooming daffodils now.


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## whitebark (Jul 14, 2004)

I met a group in northern BC that pinches their queens off during honey flow, I think they are nuts; but I guess a local guru has pushed that approach...seems to work for them.


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## BadBeeKeeper (Jan 24, 2015)

A 1987 article in the Journal of Economic Entomology (Volume 80, No. 2, Robert G. Danka & Norman E. Gary) discusses hive size in relation to foraging activity. Summed up basically, larger hives have a higher percentage of foragers. Further, the better the nectar flow, the more bees will turn to foraging duty.

The way it works is this:

It takes a relatively fixed number of bees to care for a given amount of brood, plus other 'house' duties. Let's assume a single deep brood box (and I'm going to pull round numbers out of my butt because this info was in a course I took several years ago and my notes are not near to hand)- We will assume a max population capacity of about 30,000 to 35,000 bees. At up to about 10,000 bees the large majority will be needed to care for brood, any number greater than that the number of foragers will increase. At max population, you will have about 20-25,000 foragers.

If you increase your hive size to two deeps, you will have a max population capacity of about 70,000 bees and about 20,000 will be needed to care for brood and 'house' duties. This will give you about 50,000 foragers.

20k bees = 10k house + 10k foragers (equal, 50% are house bees)
35k bees = 10k house + 25k foragers (2.5 times as many foragers)
70k bees = 20k house + 50k foragers (5 times as many foragers)

These are just rough numbers, and will vary according to the amount of brood present, weather (temperature), and amount of nectar available.

(This past Summer, although I had plenty of bees there just wasn't diddly squat for nectar due to a lack of rain. The bees worked their butts off and were barely able to make enough honey to get through Winter, so no harvest for me.)


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

Michael Bush said:


> Get the population to peak right at the main flow.


this, to which i would add do what you can to thwart their swarm ambition and make sure they stay queenright or at least have a replacement queen in the works. 

in my experience i get better production with queenright colonies. those that have their queen fail and aren't successful making a new one just prior to or during the main flow seem to stop working as hard when it comes to putting up honey.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

If you take out all the open and cap brood frames and put in drawn comb with
supers as well as confined the queen on the bottom frame, then you will have close to
70,000 foragers except the younger bees working for the honey. Keep on adding cap
frames from the supporting nuc hives (not production hives) then see what you will get on the flow.


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## rolftonbees (Jul 10, 2014)

A stimulation feeding in mid to late Jan and another in mid to late Feb. Will get the queen to lay a couple rounds of brood so there will be a few extra hands on deck when it's time to build up in early march.

It's sort like starting seeds indoors to get a jump on spring gardening.


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