The weather in Southeast Ontario in April, May, and early June, was unusually cool and wet. Not exactly the kind of climate we were hoping for, after coming out of a cold winter with a thirty percent bee mortality rate. However as spring turned to summer the cool weather turned hot, the bees surprised everyone. Without delay the strongest hives were split in hopes the new queens would mature, mate, and lay eggs before the first of July; we hoped the hives would get strong before the start of the traditional summer honey flow.
Our hopes were answered, and we began to 'super' the hives before the end June, not only to provide for honey storage, but to cool the strong colonies and keep them content at home. Last week I was adding 6 or 8 supers on a yard of 30 colonies, This week I have several yards with most of the hives supered, and one perfect yard where every colony has a honey super. Just to set the record straight - I now have my original 400 colonies back, after losing 100 (more or less) over the winter.
There's more to supering (adding a honey box) then you might imagine. First and foremost we check the hive to make sure it has a healthy queen laying eggs in the brood chamber. This is important because if the hive is queenless it will soon die, and we not only lose our year's honey crop, but probably also the wax frames which are then at great risk for loss or damage by wax moths.
If the hive has a young queen, not yet mated, its very possible that she may come back from her mating flight and enter the honey box above the queen excluder where she will begin to lay eggs. When she fills the honey supers with brood, the worker bees will store the honey below in the brood chambers where the beekeeper cannot get it.
If the hive is not checked for a laying queen before the honey super goes on, a young mated queen may be about to begin laying. At this stage in her life, although she is mated, she has not yet grown to her full size, and as she moves about in the hive she might crawl up through the excluder into the honey box.
We always begin supering with a single box on each hive. This is because Honeybees like to fill several boxes at the same time, which makes a lot of handling and extra work for the beekeeper as he gathers his early honey crop for extraction. The only exception to this, would be if the colony was exceptionally strong, with bees hanging on the outside of the broodboxes. Then we would add an extra honeybox to help cool the hive, and make the colony more comfortable
Later on, we sometimes tease the bees by adding a super of wax foundation (this is undrawn comb as it comes from the bee supply house). We like to put this on top of a box of drawn honeycomb. The bees will fill the super of drawn comb completely, before beginning to draw out the foundation above. They hate starting from scratch on the flat plastic or wax sheets, but when they have no other choice they will draw out the foundation and fill it with honey.
What sweet little creatures they are!
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