Adding a second honey super

[Lord Viykor]

I kicked my first hive off with a nucleus in October last year, it has certainly taken off and I added a honey super in late December. When I checked the hive two weeks ago I noticed that most of the frames in the honey super are drawn and are being capped off.

I was going to add a second honey super to it, being a new beek I'm after some feedback on whether this is the way to go. With summer now officially ended should I leave it as stores for the bees I have?

[Lone]

You could see if the honey frames will get capped off so you can extract them and return the drawn stickies. It is good to leave at least a couple of frames of honey for the bees when you extract unless you are in a big flow. In QLD, a flow can happen at any time.  Keep an eye out for what is flowering during the year, and whether more honey is coming into the hive.

If you need more spare drawn frames, then adding a super of plain frames while you are on a flow is possible.  It can be risky though to have all undrawn frames and could result in an abscond when the bees see all the work ahead of them.  You should make sure the bee population is big enough for the space you give them.  A simple rule is that you can add a super when the lid is full of bees.

If you feel like you want to leave honey for the bees then you should put the excluder above that super so they can use it for brood or whatever they like.  But if I were you, I'd aim for some rent to extract so you can have honey on your toast.

Having said all that, I've had to add more honey or brood supers because they are on a flow here at the moment but are not capping off what they have, so I am not able to extract.  Someone told me they will finish capping when the flow starts to reduce.

Lone

[Lord Viykor]

I checked my hive today the first honey super has every frame totally capped, there was burr comb all through the migratory lid. I was truly surprised they capped off all the frames do quickly the super only went on the hive in December.

So I've added a second super to it now, don't have any gear to extract at present, I'll have to see about borrowing the bee clubs extractor when the new super is full.

One thing I've noticed and it's probably my inexperience in bee keeping is I seem to kill a couple of dozen bees when I open my hive. Some are squashed by accident but the others just seem to end up dead in front of the hive soon after. Not sure what I'm doing wrong maybe they are getting squashed between the frames without me realising it.

[west end apiary]

hey if you are interested you could extract 3/4 of those frames. I have multiple hives down the coast and am going into my third year and have discovered that the bees will fly and collect nectar through the whole of winter. I know that my bees were able to fly everyday last winter. This means that you have to extract late in March/early April and then again in late July/early August. I got my first hive in July and they swarmed by early August. This was because they had done well in winter and were full and crowded in ealry August. An extraction in early August will prevent an early swarm and should let you get a good amount of the early spring honey.

Hope this helps, Nick