Should I harvest honey from a new package hive?
This is what I look
like when I accidentally take a picture of myself running away
from the bee hive after sticking a camera underneath and
disturbing about a hundred bees who were sheltering there since
they didn't fit inside.
The smaller photo is the picture I took up
through the hive bottom before the flash set the bees off.
That's right, our strongest
hive has already partially drawn out the comb on their
fourth Warre box (equivalent to a Langstroth super in size).
I was alerted to the congestion by the now-typical
bearding at the hive entrance, which brings me to my
conundrum of the day.
I definitely need to
add a new box to this hive since the fall nectar flow just keeps
getting better. The question is, do I cut
down a Langstroth box to make a fifth Warre box (relatively easy since I
ordered extra top bars this summer, but potentially heavy lifting
to get a new box underneath); do I take the unused fourth box from
the hive that 
swarmed this spring (easy, but risks
bothering that hive twice for no reason if the nectar flow
continues long enough that they need a fourth box despite their
slow start); or do I harvest one box of honey from the strong hive
and then put the empty back underneath? I was leaning toward
option one until I realized how hard it would be to lift up three
full (and one partially full) Warre boxes to get a new one
underneath. All suggestions (except for Huckleberry's
admonition that we should all just finish our naps) are
appreciated.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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