Laurence Edwards inspects a massive hive on June 4th with four supers stacked on top, each frame holding 20-25 pounds of capped honey. After stopping spring extractions for two years and letting the bees build naturally, he's seeing his best spring harvest ever, with every box essentially full.
So as you can see, we've got some very tall stacks of boxes here. 14 by 12 brood box, 4 supers. Let's get inside, see what the bees have done. So even on that top box there, you can see jam-packed full of bees. I'm going to pull some of the frames out now and show you, but you can see all the way up to the top we are full to the brim with bees. So it doesn't get much better than that. We're on the 4th of June today and we are on the top box of a 4-super Stack and they are looking like this. Perfectly capped over. Only a tiny little bit still left to be capped, but I'd be happy to extract all three of those frames there. Once you mix it all together, the moisture content will be just fine. Just look at those cappings though. No areas missed. Let's jump down to the next box and see if we've got something similar. Just a little close-up for this camera here. Absolutely incredible cappings. Probably my favorite time of the year is the first spring harvest when you're looking at all of that honey and thinking, wow, the bees have done. Such a good job. So really, really good weight to that one. That is essentially full. I reckon you've got 20, 25 pounds of honey in there. That is a good start at the top of the stack. Right, next box down, more of the same. Lots and lots of capped honey, so you can't ask for more than that. It's really crazy, we got off to such a slow start this year with the cold spring, and the bees have more than made up for it over the past 2 or 3 weeks. They have filled all of these cells. So the further down you go, you're just getting more of the same. I'm not going to show you all of the honey frames, but believe me, every single box here is full, barring the last one that I put on, which is pretty much fully drawn out now. Went on as foundation, and now they just started drawing it out and filling nectar in it. 2023 has got to go down as by far and away my best spring harvest. So I'm really lucky here. No oilseed rape. Stopped extracting my spring crop about 2 years ago. All I'm going to do is just leave these boxes to stack up, and hopefully by the time we get to summer, they'll be somewhere up here.
