Honey Harvest & Winter Hive Prep | Bee Wednesday Ep. 13

Welcome back to another episode of Bee Wednesday! 🐝

With crisp autumn air and colder weather right around the corner, it is officially time to shift our focus in the apiary. We’re moving away from encouraging the bees to build out extra honey supers for us, and pivoting to the most important task of the season: making sure the colony is strong, healthy, and fully prepped to survive the winter months.

In this episode, we’re opening up the hive, inspecting our deep frames for health and brood patterns, hunting for our marked queen, and pulling some gorgeous capped honey frames to bring inside for extraction!

🎥 Watch the Full Video

Watch Bee Wednesday Ep. 13 on YouTube

🐝 Episode Breakdown & Hive Inspection

1. Reassessing Hive Anatomy

Before diving in, we take a look at our full setup—currently stacked with a base, two deep brood boxes, and one honey super on top. Our main objective today is to strip back that top super so the bees don’t have extra, drafty space to heat when winter hits.

2. Checking Winter Stores & Deep Frames

As we work our way down into the deep boxes, we’re looking for a healthy balance of capped honey, pollen, and open brood space. We even take a peek at a replacement frame put in earlier in September after an emergency frame fix—it’s always amazing to see how quickly these girls build out comb when they have work to do! The deep frames are packed with capped honey, which we leave entirely for them as their essential winter rations.

3. Queen Spotted! 👑

No hive inspection is complete without checking on her majesty! We were lucky enough to spot our queen hanging out on one of the central brood frames—easy to spot with her distinct green mark. Seeing an active, healthy queen gives us total peace of mind that this colony is going into winter strong.

4. Clearing the Super & Bringing Home the Harvest

Once we confirm the brood nest is solid, it’s time to harvest! We carefully brush and shake the worker bees off the target frames so we aren’t bringing half the colony into the kitchen. What’s left behind is stunning: frames filled end-to-end with deep golden, perfectly capped honeycomb ready for the harvest bucket.

📋 Winter Hive Prep Checklist

If you’re wrapping up the season in your own backyard apiary, here is a quick cheat-sheet for late-season hive management:

Step	Action	Why It Matters
1	Remove Honey Supers	Reduces overall box volume so the cluster can easily maintain cluster warmth.
2	Verify Hive Stores	Ensure the lower deep boxes have 60–80+ lbs of capped honey reserved for food.
3	Confirm Queen Status	Verify healthy brood patterns or spot your marked queen to ensure a queen-right colony.
4	Consolidate & Protect	Stack down to two deeps, remove excluders, and get entrance reducers ready for cold drafts and pests.

Happy Beekeeping,