Thanks for the replies, guys.
If they are too tall, you can harvest, or you can split them. You'll get more honey if you don't split them and apparently you don't want to anyway. So it seems you'd be better off harvesting.
My concern is that in our humid climate, it takes bees long to cap honey. I often have 3 supers on a hive and none are ready to be harvested because the first box isn't capped yet. But we'll see how it goes. The blackberry isn't as runny as the sourwood, so maybe it won't be a big issue, and perhaps I can reduce them when the dearth hits before sourwood.
There is also the option of a ladder... but it comes with it's own set of problems. Basically you have to lift the full super over you head to walk down the ladder with it.
Ladder
There is absolutely no way I can do this safely with a ladder. Not only is that precarious under the best of circumstances, but the area around most of my hives is not level.
if you have the wooden-ware split then recombine later.
I don't. I don't even enough boxes for the flow if things keep going like this. I'm going to have to get a few more, but I'd rather not invest in any more bottoms, tops, stands, etc. I just don't want or need this operation to get any larger.
Have you considered selling some nucs or whole hives? In PA we can do that fairly easily. My mentor tells me that it is a matter just getting inspected and then you are licensed.
I have, and I don't think you even have to be licensed in NC, but I'm just not really set up for it this season. I'm also not sure about what is more economical, breaking the hives down and selling bees, or letting the hives get big and selling honey. And if possible I'd like to try to manage the hives for honey production because I've never had the opportunity to focus on that before, I've always been mostly concerned with growth.
I talked to my family about it, and what I'm going to do for now is just have my dad help me lift boxes down. He's 6' 4" so I should be able to get to 7 or 8 boxes before he'd have trouble lifting them, and he's almost always outside working on something over the weekend when I typically do inspections. That way I can just try letting the hives get big for this season and see what happens. If it becomes unmanageable then I'll develop a plan to do things differently next season.
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