Winding up the bee year

Winding up the bee year, preparing the hives for winter. At this point Chris and i have 2 hives in my back yard, and 3 hives across town, just out of the city limits. Moving Chris' two/three hives was kind of time consuming, but it's done. We have extracted honey from my two hives. Took us two goes at it, and we've got about 100 lbs of honey from them. What we have left is (for each) two hive bodies and one super. The supers, at least, are full of honey. See attached photo of the end frame from one of the hives. It's absolutely packed.

Next up is a visit to the three hives we moved late in the summer. Doubtful we'll get any further honey out of them, but you never know. It has been very hot and dry all summer, and they're in a dry field. Still, there are weeds, and some flowering plants, so it's possible they've settled down and produced some further honey. We left them with a bunch of partially extracted frames to see if they could clean things up and get their new hives all together.

All the hives have new queens. The queens are either supercedure queens, or the old queens in the swarms. None of them are more than a year old, however. A lot of the genetic material has come from the swarms we captured last year from the 'feral' hive way up in Dave Armstrong's willow tree.