The primary "benefit" is emptying frames via extraction for the bees to fill up again. Saves on needing to buy equipment. The advantage to NOT harvesting is that the bees will have all the food they gathered to get through winter on. You get to supplement if they haven't created surplus and in fact need more stores.

I use 2 deeps (and several three deeps) for my brood chambers and I never harvest honey from the brood nest. I take all supers off for winter and plan that the bees will store enough for themselves in the brood chamber. Being a hopefully intelligent sort, I also plan to put them on a scale to see if they have gathered enough. I will feed if they are below my target winter weight. The last thing I want to do as a hobbyist is to harvest honey only to feed later on.

 

welcome aboard! i'm not a pro but one benefit that i can think of has to do with swarm prevention for the next spring. if a colony has lots of honey at the top of the hive in the spring the bees will work part of the way up through it and then swarm. if a colony swarms it looses the potential to provide harvestable honey, plus in an urban or suburban setting swarms can become a nuisance to one's neighbors if they make their new home in a building. having empty drawn comb is useful for certain swarm prevention techniques and also comes in handy if one is making up splits or nucs.

 

I think about winter. The more space there is in the hive, the more there is to heat.

 

Bees do not heat the hive, They heat the cluster. A winter cluster of bees is constantly moving Inner bees generate heat, outer bees act as insulation, they change places continually. so from that stand point hive size is irrelevant.

Weather you take honey or leave it is up to you. People keep bees for different reasons, If the honey does not matter to you, then leave it for the bees. It is wise to ensure the stores are of sufficient quantity and arranged in a location so the bees can access them without breaking cluster.

 

Yeah, but that honey will hold a lot of heat during the night as well.....

 

interesting quandary. capped honey as a heat sink. wonder if it takes more resources to heat up then it benefits regulating hive temps

 

>Do you need to harvest the honey?
No.

No one harvesting wild hives and they've been do just fine for 100 million years.

More bees starve in the spring because of beek error.

 

what are the benefits to harvesting honey other than to sell/eat it?

reply:

Depends on the point of view. From the bees pov there is no benefit to taking there honey. From the beekeepers pov profit and food ARE some of the main reasons to harvest honey especially when its not a hobby. If you left an extra 100 pounds on them that they didn't consume you'd have to lift that box off every time you inspected. Mutiply this time 10, 50, 100+ hives is you back broke yet? Plus reasons mentioned above by others.

 

I take the lazy approach... Can I pull the last batch of honey.... nope, seems like work to me, and then possibly having to feed them back some stores if the fall flow is non-existent like usual... well that's even more work... so I see it as a win-win just leaving it on there.

 

Thanks for the info all! Someone told me it encourages more honey production but I figured they never stop really. & I did hear about the swarming. I have no idea really so this was helpful.