# Good news/Bad news



## Bush_84 (Jan 9, 2011)

So the good news is that I finally had my first harvest. This is my second year and last year I had to feed to get enough stores for winter. I learned a lot. I also got to use my triangle bees escape, which worked great. Only a few stragglers. I had it on overnight. So that's the good news.

Bad news is my harvest was pretty small. The weather was poor so I didn't do a full inspection. This warre is currently on six boxes. The top two were supered and the bottom was nadired. So I know that all three in between have comb. The topmost of those three felt heavy. About a month ago I went to add the second super and seeded this box with two combs from the super below. So in a way I checkerboarded the hive. Well apparently the month of July sucked and no comb was built and the honey in the seed combs in the top box was consumed...so in the end I had about three warre combs that I harvested. Good thing I had a medium Lang super that washed 6 of 8 combs ready to harvest or it would have been a waste.

Another piece of good news is that my extractor worked great with both my Lang and warre combs. My Lang frames are foundationless. No issues with combs crumbling or tearing. 

If anybody recalls I had bear trouble and they lost their queen later from what i suspect was robbing. So after harvesting I put all the comb I had from those two warre boxes into one. Put it on top and then combined the single box bear hive on top of that with newspaper. If the weather is better this weekend I will fully inspect this warre hive and see how the combining went. I plan on wintering on three boxes so I may be able to harvest more depending on what the lower boxes look like and the fall flow, which is already starting. It will be nice if those two boxes I put back on get filled!


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## chaindrivecharlie (Apr 6, 2008)

Hey Dan, how did the combine go, and are they backfilling those empty frame combs?


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## Bush_84 (Jan 9, 2011)

The combine went well. After they had chewed through the newspaper, I put that box on the bottom and put the extracted box on top. It looks like that in the last week I am seeing some activity pick up at the entrance again. So I assume that the goldenrod etc must be picking up. I noticed that they were filling the extracted box some already.


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## Zonker (Mar 10, 2010)

The solution to small harvests is more hives. Also having multiple hives makes bee keeping a lot easier.


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