> In the case of Canada, as I understand it, the
> main crop of canola honey granulates rock hard, and bee winter poorly on
> it.  Thus it needs to be removed and replaced with cured sugar syrup if
> there is no fall flow.

This can be true, but today's canola honey is much better than the old
rape honey that way.  That is not to say that canola honey can't still
sometimes be a huge problem for the bees, and even more so the
extracting line. The speed and degree of granulation can be unpredictable.

For winter, regardless of the hive weight, Alberta beekeepers usually
"top up" the stores in the brood boxes with sugar so that the bees have
good clean liquid stores during the coldest weather when granulated
honey is like concrete and in spring when the populations are reduced
and vulnerable.  The fall feeding also brings the lighter hives up to
wintering weight.

The problem with predicting how much 'surplus' can safety be taken, and
a problem which is less than obvious to a small operator in a less
severe climate is that doing so requires and ability to predict the
future, and our futures vary wildly from year to year with no warning.

Flows here can be as much as 30 lbs a day and honey must be removed
efficiently and routinely, ideally once a week.

The honey MUST be removed when it comes in.  If not, within a week or
three, the honey may become too hard to extract.  I had several thousand
boxes like that one time.  Never again.

Commercial honey removal and extraction is a high pressure system
requiring reliable equipment, co-ordination and careful management.  If
it fails, the hives plug, honey granulates, and the results echo for a
year or more into the future.  A few of the enduring effects are excess
burr comb, glued up brood boxes, supers and frames,reduced brood
rearing, poorer wintering -- and swarming if the season is still early.

Of course we don't get 30 lbs a day every day or even two days in a row,
and we don't know when this will happen or how long it will go on.

Sometimes the flow starts in June, and is continuous, and sometimes
there is little surplus until August.  Sometimes the flows are all over
August 20th and sometimes they continue heavy into October.  Regardless,
the job is full-on removing honey until things slow.

Beekeepers here only pull down to the brood chambers, which are usually
doubles, but sometimes singles, however, these boxes may be full of
brood and have varying amounts of honey.  If the season tapers off, the
broods can be quite heavy, but if it stops suddenly, they can be light.

There is no way to predict unless it is a really bad year, when they are
light all along and there may be no crop to remove.  At such times,
feeding is mandatory, but financing it may be tough.

So what I am saying is that the best operators drive right down the
middle of the possibilities and take the most riskless choices they can see.

Generally speaking (for Bill), the adverse effects of failing to remove
honey in Alberta are worse than the effects of removing too much -- as
long as the option is there to feed heavily and promptly the moment the
supers are off and hives seem light.

And, yes the fear of granulation complicates things.

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