Preparing for the harvest

Sketch showing the trajectory the crown board
needs to take

While I was away today (on urgent business - of course!), my very helpful and heroic teacher colleague jumped into the beesuit and prepared the hives for the taking off of the supers tomorrow. What he did was to put one-way systems into the crown boards. Then he took the crown boards away from the top of the hive, where their job should be to tell the bees that this is the end of their hive (the school bees never listen to that one!) and placed them both just above the brood box and queen excluders, meaning the bees can exit the supers into the brood box, but not then scurry back up again, meaning (unlike last year), the supers should be free of bees. Let's see if that works this time.

The crown board with the one way white plastic
system in place

Operation successful: the finished product

I have a very early start tomorrow, getting the extractor, and then in the afternoon, we'll see how much honey we get.