Harvesting honey by absconding

I finished with the MH hive yesterday, the third box was full of honey but half of the box was filled with cross comb, to get the first frame out I had to tear through the honeycomb and make a huge mess. I pulled out three frames and got the bees off of them as best I could. The rest of the honey was going to be even harder to harvest.

This was a problem because the bees had a box with no guides in it, so they made the comb in a different direction than the frames. It works fine for them, but it makes it hard on the beekeeper. I decided to try a different method of harvesting, I set the box of honey above the hive, separated by an open box and an inner cover. The idea is that when the sun goes down and the temperatures drop the bees will go down into the hive and leave the honey. The beekeeper then collects the honey with only a few bees left on it.

My problem is that I did this in the afternoon when the bees were the most active. This set off a very vigorous robbing/defensive behavior as all of the hives in the apiary started collecting this honey. After getting stung twice when being nowhere near the hive I declared the yard off limits for the rest of the day.

Before dawn the next day I collected what was left in the box, the bees collected most of the honey that was there but I will still have some. Most importantly, I learned that this will only work when done just before dusk. I'll be trying it with another hive tomorrow.

Also interesting is that this morning there were hundreds of bees looking for water, the pool I have for them only had a small puddle left and they were all over it. All of the honey they collected needed to be diluted down so they could reprocess it and store it. I could probably collect the honey again, but I've stressed that hive enough this Fall. I'll let them go into Winter heavy, the honey I would have collected lost to my learning experience.