Timing question

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RoseCottage

Field Bee
Joined
Dec 29, 2009
Messages
718
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0
Location
Near Andover, UK
Hive Type
WBC
Number of Hives
From 5 to 2 and hopefully a better year
Hi,
We are surrounded by OSR and are beginning to get nervous about the removal of supers with honey in them. We have a couple of questions:

1. Has anyone taken supers from OSR bees yet this year?

We have two supers with frames pretty full but not yet capped, some capping has begun but only on a small scale. Both supers are pretty full.

When is the right time to remove these for spinning?
If and when we do pull them, how long can we leave them before we spin?

Also, Does anyone know whether a standard size brood frame can be spun in the Thornes 2 frame budget spinner? We are moving from standard BB to deep BB at the moment and the girls are packing in stores in the standard BB as they go. We are using this to allow them to hatch out any larvae from frames rotated out of the deep BB. Perhaps I should leave this in for the girls.

All thoughts, advice, welcome. I was hoping to start super removal tonight as I cannot get back to the hive until the weekend at the earliest.

All the best,
Sam.
 
What others are doing is academic as their conditions and weather will for sure be different.

If you do not have instrumentation to check the wather content then you are looking at a good shake of the super frame to see if it flies out or not. If not then you are "probably" safe to extract but it does take judgement and I used both a warm air drying system and a good refractometer to keep a check on what was what.

PH
 
if supers are full, give quickly a new super with foundations or what ever combs you have.
Put new room allways them over the brood frames.
Probably part of brood frames are full of honey and those i woud lift into super box.
 
ive removed OSR honey allready and it had just started to set in the comb. To check if its ready shake the super frame, if some comes out its not ready, if it stays in get it off asap. Once you have removed, extract the honey THAT day as it begins to cool and start setting.

As finman says, if they have filled two supers give them more supers and when you put clearer boards on ( to remove the honey) dont forget to put supers under the boards so the bees have somewhere to go.
 
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