Harvesting honey from a Warre hive

The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Harvesting honey from a Warre hive

Hive conversion success As Mark mentioned yesterday, we finally harvested honey for the first time in six years. The long-time reader might assume that means my conversion back to Langstroth hives while keeping my chemical-free strain of bees going was just what the doctor ordered. And you wouldn't necessarily be wrong...but you wouldn't necessarily be right either.

The jury's still out on which hive system makes more honey because I harvested about the same amount from both the primarily Langstroth hive and from the Warre hive. In both cases, the honey overload is due to an excellent nectar season that culminated in our basswood blooming fully for the first time in nearly a decade. Lots of nectar makes lots of honey, regardless of the type of hive.

So how much honey did I take? It's complicated. Initially, I planned to harvest the one remaining Warre box on top of our converted hive since I'd found lots of brood and eggs lower down on Langstroth frames and knew the queen had vacated the attic. But once I got that box home and started pulling out the frames, I discovered that there was still brood at the bottom. So I harvested three full frames of honey and went to put the Warre box back with its brood intact.

But I really wanted to call that conversion complete, so I put the box back on the other hive instead of the one I originally took it from. And while I was in there, I discovered that the Warre hive had a very full box of capped honey as well as at least two other quite heavy boxes. So I snagged the former rather than towering their living quarters over my head.

To cut a long story short, I think I ended up harvesting about 1.3 Warre boxes in the end. Rather than going high-tech, I simply squeezed each frame into a strainer and ended up with about 2.5 gallons of honey. A very sweet reward after years of trial and error!