As a new beekeeper, I've discovered a new challenge. My bees left two supers with partially filled frames, one on each hive. The frames have enough honey in them to provide nice winter feeding for the bees but with the onset of cooler nights and days, the bees aren't interested in finishing the filling and capping of these supers. (And there's not much out there for nectar gathering to do so.)
The Beemaster experts (Michael Bush in particular) suggested that putting the supers with the partially filled frames above the inner cover would help.
The idea is that the bees then think this honey is outside of the hive and they move it down into the bottom two hive bodies (below the inner cover) to add to their stores for the winter.
I opened the hives for a quick moment before leaving for the mountains this weekend and did just that. I put the supers with the partially filled frames above the inner cover. You can see this by noticing the inch board (the inner cover) between the super and the medium hive body. To help I've drawn red arrows on the last picture in this post pointing to the inner cover.
Later this week when I have an opportunity, I'll see if the bees are doing their job of moving the honey.
My next challenge, which I'll post to the Beemaster's forum and put pictures up on this site,
is to learn how to clean or whether to clean the frames that I used for crush and strain honey bottling.The good news: While in the mountains this weekend I found an old double boiler in good shape at a fun junk store called the Sassy Chicken. This should be perfect for melting my wax this year - next year it's the solar wax melter's job!
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