Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Placing honey boxes
Many commercial beekeepers, myself included, often move hives to remote areas many
hours from their operations base. In such cases, the hives are placed in a position to take
advantage of the local honey flow, and several honey boxes are placed on them at once.
Then, later on, when time permits another visit to the site, more boxes are placed on
the hives if required. This seems to work very well, which suggests that all the theories
about how and when to place supers on hives may not be very sound.
It follows, then, that you should put sufficient boxes on to last until your next visit.
Putting 'too many' boxes on should do no harm, and putting on too few will cause
problems for the bees and lessen your honey crop.
There may just be one objection to this policy, however. If there are insufficient bees
in the hive to move up into the new supers - especially the top ones - and you have
used frames of comb, then the wax moth may enter and damage the comb, sometimes
beyond repair. They will do this because there won't be any bees up there looking
after things. The moths are unlikely to bother with foundation, however (they prefer
used comb), so, if you use comb in the first one or two boxes and then place boxes of
foundation, you should be fine.
Whenever you first put the supers on, it should always be before the main honey flow
starts. Apart from being a good swarm-prevention measure in the spring, it will stop
the bees storing nectar in the brood nest which, in turn, lessens the room for the queen
to lay eggs.
Helping your bees to store honey
When conditions are ideal and there is a heavy honey flow on, it is amazing how quickly
a healthy colony manages to store huge amounts of honey. When this happens, there
are several ways in which you can help your bees to store their honey more efficiently.
It is not essential to use supers full of comb when supering up, but it does help the bees
if a heavy flow is on. Another way to assist the bees is to have entrances in each of the
supers in the form of a drilled hole 1 cm (½ in) across. This saves the bees from having
to enter at the bottom of the hives, crawl up through the brood areas, scramble through
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