No Queen

[Gabmux]

This would allow you, with your pulled comb and honey frames to have a honey maker if conditions allow next summer. I would harvest a frame or two for my own use, providing its not sugar syurp, and freeze the rest for the spring. In the mean time I would locate some paramoth for those brood combs so wax moths wouldn't damage them until spring.

Yes I would like to harvest a frame of two.
Is there some way to tell if one is sugar syrup?
I did feed some syrup early spring 2012 and late fall of 2011.

I will try to find paramoth.
I am assuming that I can I leave the frames of pulled comb with the paramoth treatment
in the hive over winter. Should I also seal all openings of the hive for winter?

Thank you for your time.

Pat L.

[Gabmux]

For getting the honey, just use a fork or knife to uncap the cells, and then lay the frame flat on a cheese cloth like you said, over a bucket of course, and let the honey drain for a day or so.

A note on the queen situation, as someone had mentioned the possibility of a swarm and virgin queen. When is the last time you saw the queen? In a typical swarm situation, the hive won't swarm until the new queen cells are capped. When they leave there should still be fresh eggs in the hive. This means that the new queen should hatch and mate before all the eggs that were left will pupate and hatch into new bees. If there was a virgin queen, there should still be brood. Note that I said this is a "typical" situation. Typical is a pretty loose term in beekeeping IMHO
I'd worry in your climate it is too late to requeen. You only have the one hive though so I guess no chance of combining with another. Shame. Better luck next year! At least you got some honey out of the deal.

Thank you Tom for kind reply.
I still have not found a queen in hive as of this time.
I've also been watching the bees coming and going.
And I have seen none of them bring in any pollen.

If you have time, I have a question about cutting the caps
off the honey frame and draining the honey.

I'm guessing that the mission is to just cut the caps off
and leave as much comb as possible for the bees to reuse.

Is that correct?

I am also guessing that after draining the comb of honey,
the drained comb would still be sticky.
Would I then put the drained combs back into the hive over winter?
Or would I store them some other way?
Perhaps treat with paramoth first as in an earlier post?

Thank you for your time.

Pat L.

[Tom Brueggen]

Just a note, be extremely careful with frozen comb, as it can be brittle. At least empty frozen new comb was. When I went to grab it out of the container it just crumbled in my hand, as if it were made of dust. When I froze a bar of honeycomb once, I made sure and let it fully thaw under no stress before I moved it around or cut it. No problems. And again, the brittleness may only be with new comb, but I'm assuming yours is pretty new since they were first year bees. Good luck!

[Tohya]

Yes I would like to harvest a frame of two.
Is there some way to tell if one is sugar syrup?
I did feed some syrup early spring 2012 and late fall of 2011.

I will try to find paramoth.
I am assuming that I can I leave the frames of pulled comb with the paramoth treatment
in the hive over winter. Should I also seal all openings of the hive for winter?

Thank you for your time.

Pat L.

There no way for you to easily tell if the frames have sugar syrup in them.

You will want to, at least, put a mouse guard on the hive.

[Keefis]

Do bees cap nectar and syrup, or just honey? I thought the nectar and syrup was open and continually processed(bees mouth your nectar to dry it out) until it is honey,then dried out further to the correct water content before capping.
Anybody??

[Tohya]

The bees treat nectar and sugar syrup the same. And once the moisture content is low enough they will cap it.