If you want to help the bees with drying and capping, make sure you have both a lower hive opening and an upper one. This allows a circular airflow where drier, cooler air comes in the bottom, and warmer, wetter air leaves through the top.
Uncapped honey may contain too much water
The bees left these cells uncapped because the nectar still contains too much water for long-term storage. For whatever reason, the bees did not finish drying those cells and now you are perplexed, wondering what to do with them.
After the moisture content of the honey has been reduced to approximately 18 percent the bees will cap it under a thin layer of wax. There are two types of capped honey, referred to as “wet” and “dry”. Dry capped honey is what many of us are familiar with and is most desired by consumers.
New beekeepers frequently ask “How long does it take for bees to fill a frame?” A healthy hive on a good nectar flow can quickly fill a six-frame Flow super in a couple of weeks. It depends entirely on conditions. If nectar availability dries up the bees will remove honey from the frames to survive.
Uncapped honey, during the nectar flow can and will have open honey cells in the frame. The reason a honey bee does not cap these cells is that the moisture level, in that cell, is above 18% moisture content. If you harvest “high moisture” honey, the honey will begin to ferment in your container.
If you remove the uncapped honey, it will probably mold or ferment in storage because it's not protected from airborne yeast and mold. If you extract it before it's ripe, it may ferment in your jars. The rule of thumb is that honey for extraction should never contain more than about 10% uncapped cells.
There are many tools available to uncap honey. Some beekeepers use an electric hot knife for this job. It has a heating element in the blade, and may even be equipped with a thermostat. Ideally the knife blade stays just the right temperature to effortlessly melt through the beeswax cappings.
Don't Add Supers Too Early - It Can Set Your Bees Back! Are you wondering when should I add supers to a beehive or what is the best time to add supers? Throughout the season, we use the 80% rule when adding new boxes. When 80% of the frames in the box below are covered by bees, you can safely add the next super.
As you know, nectar is what bees turn in to honey. Bees turn nectar into honey by removing the moisture content from the nectar. Once the bees are pleased with the moisture level, they seal it off with wax. This “cap” keeps the honey from losing any more moisture.
You can put all the partially capped frames in a super above an inner cover. As long as the days remain warm enough for the bees to move around, they will move the honey from the super down close to the brood nest. If you want them to remove all of it, scratch open the capped cells.
Bees will move honey around within the hive to make room for the queen to lay eggs. So it's possible they will move honey into the super.
The honeycomb with wet cappings is not actually wet, but it looks like it might be. The appearance is darker and may have a variegated pattern due to scattered mini air pockets, which have a lighter color. While some honey bees produce both types of capping, some consistently build one kind or the other.
Quality foundation is dipped in wax. Super duper quality foundation in doubled-dipped in wax. The wax encourages the bees to build comb on it (spraying the foundation with sugar syrup can help a little bit too, but it's all for naught without wax). No wax causes them to ignore it for as long as they can.
In all but the warmest areas, I recommend that a beekeeper leave 80 to 90 pounds (36-41 kg). In nearly all cases, this will assure a good supply of natural food for your bees, and it will save you messing around with syrups and sugars and supplements. In short, it is good for them and good for you.
Brood Development
That glistening white substance is brood food, produced by the nurse bees. The grub eats and eats and eats, fed by nurse bees over 100x per day. After approximately 5.5-6 days, the cell is capped with wax. Underneath that capping, the larva stretches out and spins a cocoon of silk.
If honey is not harvested from the hive, they will eventually run out of space to not only make more honey, but also for the queen to lay eggs. When this happens, your colony will swarm and you will lose a majority of your bees.
The total weight of bees, hive furniture, and honey in such a set-up is ideally about 160 pounds. The minimum amount of honey you should leave on your full-sized colony is equal to one full deep box, or about 90-100 pounds (this is the full weight of the box, frames, bees, and honey).
If no nectar rains out, or only a couple drips rain out after vigorous shaking, it's cured and ready to harvest. If a full super has very little to no capped honey, it's generally not ready to harvest. But, if half of the cells are capped, it is the end of the honey flow date wise, then it's typically fine to harvest.
Even if honey had been sitting on your shelf for 2,000 years, that honey would still be as good as the day you opened it. In a nutshell, well-stored honey never expires or spoils, even if it's been previously opened.
Honey isn't a perishable product. As long as it's stored in an air-tight container and isn't exposed to excess moisture, it will be safe to consume for decades or more. It's important to keep honey clean, though.
During the evening, when the bees have finished flying for the day, the roof can be removed, and wet supers stacked above the crownboard, so that the bees can come up through the feed holes, clean up our wet frames, and take any honey they can glean, back down into the hive.
Uncapping the Honey
First, scrape off the wax cappings from the tops of each cell that contains honey. Use a fork, heated knife, scratcher, or similar tool on both sides of the frame. You are now ready to reap the sweet reward and benefits of your beehives' efforts.
In simple terms, a queen excluder is a perforated barrier placed between the brood chamber and the honey super that prevents the queen from entering the honey super and laying eggs. The brood chamber is the part of the hive that the queen is confined to raise brood or baby bees.