Supering Up Your hives

Click here and send the message to have this article posted to you by email (don't write anything else, as the process is automated!)...

This article appeared in the NZ Beekeeper No. 188, in Summer 1985, pp 22-23, under the pseudonym 'Skep', the name I used to write a series for beginners several years ago.

That makes it sound very simple, doesn't it? In fact, there are quite a few fine points to adding supers to hives that I want to cover in this article. None of them will take the place of adequate spring preparation of the colony, but then beekeeping can never be reduced to only one or two procedures. Your crop at the end of the season is a result of a whole series of activities (and luck!) that must me closely observed. Supering up is just one of these.

Some beekeepers who do not use queen excluders actually use their supering up to take the place of the excluder. Assuming that you are using two boxes for the brood chamber, putting on the third box at the right time can serve to keep the queen down in the bottom without using an excluder.

If you super too early, before the bees have brought in enough nectar to serve as a 'barrier' across the tops of the combs in the second box, the queen may very well move up into the third box. If you super too late, the bees will have packed out the brood nest with honey and forced the queen into cutting back her egg laying. Putting on the super at just the right time gives the desired results.

Personally, I don't feel very confident in doing this. I prefer the surety that a queen excluder gives me. When it's on, I know where the queen is.

Most beekeepers wait until the honey flow is underway or just before to add a third box. For a beginner, though, this decision may be hard to make. One clue to look for is the storage of fresh nectar in the brood nest area, nectar which can be easily shaken from the comb. Another is the presence of fresh wax, often just small small flecks of white that appear on the top bars and other places on the comb. This shows that the honey flow is well enough advanced that the bees have begun to secrete wax and start comb building.

Another helpful hint comes through the use of 'bait' frames. Back in early comb honey production beekeepers found that it helped to lure the bees up into the supers by using partly drawn sections saved from the previous year. If you are using drawn combs and have a moderate honey flow, it may not be a problem, but if you are adding a full box of foundation, you may find the bees unwilling to move up into it to start working. If this is the case, you can lift one of the outside frames from the brood nest into the added super. Since the bees are already working on this, they continue, and then work naturally in the adjoining frames.

Beekeepers disagree over one other area of supering with foundation. Some prefer to get the combs drawn ten to the box, while others prefer to mix in sheets of foundation into boxes containing drawn combs. Whichever method you use, be careful when you place foundation to the outside of the box. Not only will the bees often not draw it out, but when they do, it may be attached with brace comb to the side of the box.

A very interesting finding by some American beekeeping researchers is that the presence of empty comb actually stimulates the bees to gather more honey. This bit of information came as a sidelight to other work relating to selection of breeder queens. It appeared that in the lab, working with small 'hoarding' cages with 50 bees, the bees stored sugar syrup more quickly if they had more comb area available. The researchers then tried it under field conditions. Using 20 hives, they supered half in the normal manner, just adding boxes as they were needed. The other half of the hives were given a whole stack of supers at the beginning of the flow and left.

Lo and behold, the second group gathered significantly more honey. Just to prove the point, they took off the honey, reversed the experimental groupings and took them to another area whose honey flow was just beginning. Again, the group with plenty of storage area collected more honey.

Now before you rush out and stack all your hives up, let me qualify that. Both of the honey flows were quite strong. In an area where the flow was not so heavy, you'd probably end up with half filled combs and boxes which would be a lot of trouble to extract. As the experimenters wrote:

'...beekeepers who have practiced restriction of super space in an effort to crowd the honey crop into a minimum number of well filled combs might profitably experiment with supplying extra comb space during promising nectar flows.'

And as another caution, the same researchers carried the idea to an extreme to see what happened and found that really large amounts of empty comb area, 6 to 8 empty supers, resulted in a smaller crop. If you want a 'human' interpretation of it, I too would be discouraged with all that empty comb area and the expectation that it needs to be filled!

Once the first honey super is on and the bees are working hard to fill it, when should you add the next? As a rule of thumb, wait until the first box is about half full before adding the second super. Again, if you wait too long, the bees will start to store down in the brood nest area, restricting the queen's laying.

And where do you put this super? "On top of the other, of course. Isn't that the way all beekeepers do it?" Not necessarily. Back in 'the old days' when beekeepers worked hard and chiropractors had not yet been invented they always did it differently.

Especially for comb honey production, the empty super was most often placed below the partly filled one. I've tried this over several seasons, but not in any controlled manner. The extra work is considerable. I can't help but think, however, that these early beekeepers often knew what they were doing in areas of bee behaviour.

When it comes time to add the third super, both the previous supers must be lifted off the hive. Its easy to see why few beekeepers super in this manner now.

Rather than continue to add supers if the flow is good, most beekeepers begin to extract the honey already stored. This has several advantages. It means that you do not have to keep as many extra supers stored for that occasional 'boomer' season. It also means that the hive does not get stacked up so high to become a target for stock, wind or vandals to push over. Some beekeepers feel that adding back a super that has just been extracted gives the bees added incentive to keep working as well.

Often when the flow is strong, bees will ripen the nectar but not bother to seal the cells until the flow is finishing. In this case, you can find frames of honey that will not shake from the comb, and yet it is for all practical purposes thoroughly ripened and finished by the bees. This is one of the only cases when it might be considered alright to extract unsealed honey. You could then extract enough frames to give the bees the storage area they need to carry on until the end of the flow.

Another variation that you might consider at this point relates to the size of boxes. Imagine yourself in the situation that you are expecting a late season honey flow, after you have taken off the main crop. From experience, you know that you will probably not get a full depth box of honey from the source. What an ideal time to use use smaller boxes! A three quarter depth box placed on the hive might be just the right amount of storage space needed. Yet another argument (as well as that of the bad back...) for using this size equipment. If your brood boxes are three quarter depth as well, there's no problem with standardization.

How many frames do you have in your honey supers? Even though ten frames (and sometimes eleven if you use narrow 33 mm end bars) can be fitted in a super, I would not suggest having them there in a honey super. Perhaps to be drawn out, so they are drawn straight and not joined with brace comb, but once you are using drawn combs, reduce the number of frames.

This gives at least two advantages. First of all, you need fewer combs. Most commercial beekeepers use eight frames in the extracting supers. Some use nine. I've known of beekeepers who use only seven, though when I've tried, they get pretty badly joined together and I damage them taking them out of the box to extract.

The second advantage comes when extracting. A comb from a hive with eight to the box is so much easier to uncap because the comb sticks out from the wood just that much further. Trying to uncap combs from frames ten to the box is a test of patience and ability.

So you see, supering up hives is not so straightforward as it would first appear. For almost every operation in beekeeping, you'll find some beekeeper to argue with you over the relative merits of one system versus another. As I said at the first of the article, none of these decisions on its own will mean success or failure. Paying close attention to advice (and evaluating the advisor!) and paying close attention to bee behaviour are two of the best suggestions I can make to any beginning beekeeper.