🐝 Day 27: Liquid Gold, Emerging Queens, and the Stalker Bee
What a wild, sticky, and incredibly rewarding two days in the apiary! Between pulling heavy frames of honey, drafting harvest notes, assisting growing armies, and dodging defensive guard bees, our honey processing season is officially in full swing.
Amanda Lea Collins
7/17/20262 min read
🍯 The Great 18-Frame Harvest
Today, we pulled a grand total of 18 full frames of capped honey from our strongest stacks!
Before spinning a single frame, I sat down to draft up the official Harvest Notes for the website. I love keeping our local honey lovers in the loop about what floral sources the girls are foraging on and what each specific harvest batch tastes like!
All 12 prime frames went straight into the extractor, yielding a full 5-gallon bucket of golden, raw honey. Junior Beekeeper James joined in on the fun, and together we started bottling our very first major haul of the 2026 season!
Once the extractor spun every last drop out, we carried those sticky, wet "extractor-clean" frames right back out to the bee yard. Giving wet comb back to the hives is a win-win: the bees eagerly clean up every last drop of leftover honey and immediately start repairing and refilling the drawn cells.
🐣 Chick-a-Bees: Queen Freyja Shares the Wealth
While working the hives, I decided I needed to bolster Queen Ethel’s army to boost her workforce. We turned to Queen Freyja’s powerhouse stack and pulled a heavy frame of capped brood ("chick-a-bees").
As I was transferring the frame, I got to witness one of the coolest miracles in beekeeping: worker bees actively chewing their way out of their wax caps! Seeing tiny damp antennae poking out and soft young bees emerging right before my eyes never gets old. Ethel’s army just got an immediate, hard-working upgrade!
🎯 The Neck Sting & The "Stalker Bee"
Of course, it wouldn't be a harvest day without a little chaos. While handling frames, one rogue, over-defensive bee managed to bypass the defenses and tagged me right on the neck.
If you thought getting stung on the cheek last week was fun, a neck sting is a whole new level of spicy! To make matters worse, as I walked away from the yard toward the house to cool off, a very persistent guard bee literally stalked me all the way to the back door, buzzing furiously around my head and refusing to let up!
🎓 Bee School: Why Do Bees "Stalker" You After a Sting?
Ever wonder why a single bee (or a small angry mob) seems to follow you across the yard—or all the way to your porch—after you get stung?
The Chemical Target (Alarm Pheromone): When a honey bee stings, her stinger detaches and continues to pump a chemical compound called isoamyl acetate (which smells strongly like artificial bananas!). This is the honey bee alarm pheromone.
The "Homing Beacon": That sting site acts as a literal glowing target beacon for other guard bees. They aren't just angry at random—they are following the scent marker attached to your skin or clothing.
Why They Pursue You: Guard bees are programmed to escort threats away from the colony until the alarm scent dissipates or until the threat is well out of territory range.
Pro-Tip: If you get stung in the yard, scrape the stinger out immediately (don't pinch it!), puff a little cool smoke over the sting site to mask the banana scent, and walk away in a zig-zag pattern through bushes or trees to break their line of sight!