As a backyard beekeeper, you work hard all season long to keep your bees happy and productive. Once those honey supers start filling up, it’s an exciting time! But then the question hits – to harvest or not to harvest? You don’t want to rob the bees of their winter stores. Yet leaving all that liquid gold seems such a waste. What exactly happens if you just leave the honey in the hive?
Bees Work Tirelessly to Produce Honey
First, let’s appreciate how much effort goes into making honey! Those busy bees visit millions of flowers during foraging flights to gather up sugary nectar. It’s an intricate dance – scout bees communicate locations, distance, and quality of flower patches to recruit others. Then the worker bees faithfully fly back and forth, sipping up nectar and transporting it back to the hive.
Once returned, they deposit the nectar into hexagonal wax comb cells for processing. But their work still isn’t done! The bees must then fan their wings rapidly to evaporate excess moisture from the nectar. They repeat this process over and over until the liquid achieves the perfect thick, sticky honey consistency. Only then do worker bees carefully cap the full cells with wax to seal in the final product.
It’s an extremely elaborate process that takes dedicated teams of worker bees to accomplish! Over thousands of flights and hours of fanning and drying nectar, a batch of honey is ready. The reward is a super cell brimming with gleaming, golden honey.
Built-Up Stores Clog and Congest the Combs
Here’s the thing – bees are smart! They intentionally make more honey than they actually need to survive the winter months. All that extra honey is their insurance policy in case flowers are scarce when spring rolls around.
But there’s a limit to how much surplus honey a hive can logically store and still function properly. Bees will keep adding to the comb until literally every cell is completely capped off with wax. If beekeepers don’t remove any excess honey, eventually the combs become clogged and congested. There’s no open space left to put incoming nectar!
All the crowded honey-filled frames pressed together don’t make for happy hives. The endless piles of honey builds up with no place to go. This creates a stressful environment for the bees as their home fills far beyond reasonable capacity.
Swarming Skyrockets as Bees Seek to Relieve Congestion
When a hive gets severely overcrowded with backlogged honey stores, the bees take drastic measures. Rather than be crammed into an overly congested living space, nearly half the colony will swarm away!
In preparation for swarming, the worker bees first raise several emergency queen cells in the brood nest. As soon as one of these new virgin queens fully emerges, the old queen departs from the hive with a huge mass exodus of workers. This swarm relocates away from the congested colony to find a new home and start fresh.
While swarming is a natural way for bee populations to expand and propagate, it can seriously reduce honey production in hives that are over crowded. Frequent swarming events indicate an underlying congestion problem that should be addressed. If the bees keep swarming due to lack of space, honey output dwindles as the workforce keeps splitting in half.
Less Room Remains for Brood Rearing
In a congested hive, the brood nest area becomes extremely cramped as well. With so much honey clogging up the available cells, the queen has very limited space left to lay eggs and expand the workforce.
The queen bee looks diligently for any last few open cells within the brood nest, but often comes up short. She simply has nowhere to lay eggs and build up the next generation. This lack of open cells leads to much smaller brood batches.
Less brood rearing means lower bee populations in the hive over time. A continually reduced workforce has to gather nectar from far fewer flowers. Honey production inevitably drops when the worker ranks aren’t being properly replaced.
Colony Health is Compromised
Besides impacting honey yields, crowded honey stores cause other problems for colony health and productivity as well. Diseases and hive-infesting pests thrive in crowded, stressful conditions with poor ventilation.
When bees have to constantly crawl over and around piles of capped honey cells just to move within the hive, their circulation and ability to regulate temperature is impeded. The tightly packed honey frames also restrict airflow.
Scientific studies have definitively linked higher disease rates with congested brood nests and honey stores. For instance, chalkbrood fungal spores explode in stressed hives, while Varroa mites reproduce unchecked. Congested colonies are far more prone to health issues!
Hive Inspections and Maintenance Become More Difficult
As a beekeeper, excess honey buildup also makes inspecting and manipulating hives much more difficult and messy. The sticky honey-laden frames are tightly wedged together in the super. Trying to pry them loose for inspection risks squashing bees in the process.
Any repairs or replacements to old comb requires carefully maneuvering slippery, dripping frames first. The risk of getting stung shoots up when the bees are crammed together and grumpy. Don’t expect to wear your nice bee suit!
Drawing out fresh comb on empty foundations is limited in a congested environment too. With a solid wall of honey surrounding the brood nest, the queen has zero space to lay eggs in new cells along the edges. Basic colony management suffers greatly when honey is hoarded long term.
Crystallization Degrades Honey Quality Over Time
What happens when honey is left sitting in the comb indefinitely? Eventually all liquid honey will crystallize from a smooth flowing state into a thick grainy or solid mass. The honey is still perfectly safe to eat but becomes useless for the bees.
Crystallized honey won’t pour and has a changed chemical composition. Bees struggle to digest it and can’t derive proper nutrition. Come winter when the colony relies on honey stores, all that crystallized honey in the comb does them little good.
Responsible beekeepers help prevent crystallization by extracting honey from the comb while still in a pure liquid state. Capped cells protect it for a while, but can’t prevent the gradual chemical shift to a solid.
Trapped Moisture Ferments and Spoils Honey
Ever opened a long forgotten jar of honey way at the back of the pantry? Upon inspection, it likely has white film or fuzzy mold growing in it! That microbial blooming occurs when moisture interacts with capped honey in the comb over an extended period.
The bees’ own respiration and nectar processing releases moisture that gets trapped in a congested hive with poor airflow. This enables yeasts and other microorganisms to establish and ferment the capped honey.
Fermented honey turns bitter and becomes toxic to bees in high concentrations. Mold growth is another clear indicator of spoilage. Congested combs often foster unhealthy microbial life that contaminates the honey.
Collapse of Honey Comb is Possible
You’ve probably seen photos of a beekeeper holding up giant 1-foot slabs of honeycomb dripping with golden nectar. In order to get such large comb chunks, the liquid weight of the honey has to strain and pull it right off the wooden frame beneath!
In a similar way, when honey is allowed to endlessly accumulate in frames, eventually the heavy liquid causes the wax comb above to collapse. The wax structure literally rips away from the foundation and breaks off. Now instead of orderly rows of hexagons, you’ve got a shattered sticky mess.
Collapsed comb filled with spoiled honey is nearly impossible for bees to repair and reuse. All that nectar they worked so hard to store carefully is wasted, oozing down into a goopy pool at the bottom of the hive. Definitely not what the industrious honey makers had in mind!
Time for a Honey Harvest!
Here’s the takeaway point – leaving year after year of excess honey in the hive does far more harm than good! As a beekeeper, it’s your responsibility to monitor honey stores and harvest the surplus.
Regularly removing extra honey relieves congestion issues and allows the colony to thrive. The bees benefit immensely from having open airflow and living space again. Honey collection is truly a win-win for both beekeepers and bees alike!
So suit up during the summer flow and extract that sweet excess before it causes issues. The extracted honey brings tasty rewards for all your careful work as an apiarist. Just be sure to leave adequate stores so the bees make it through winter. Then everyone is happy as a clam!
Well, maybe happy as a bee. But you understand – harvest that honey on schedule and keep your hives healthy and vibrant! The colony will thank you for preventing the myriad congestion problems that come from overstuffed, neglected combs. That golden nectar is meant to be shared with their human partners. So take your share – and leave enough for the bees!