Adding Supers to the Beehives
This is our first season of beekeeping. Lots of things to learn, but we have a great mentor, Steve Olson, who is a third generation beekeeper in our area.
Our two colonies are thriving. They have taken up almost the entire two boxes on the bottom of our hives. As the summer progresses, it is time to put on our supers and check the hive. We stopped by a local store that sells bee keeping equipment and we picked up a couple of our supers. The supers are where the honey will be stored by the bees. These are the sections that will actually make our honey that we will harvest. Anything below in the two main hives will be for the bees for winter, and anything above will be for us.
As usual, we got our smoker and gear out and popped the top of our hive off. Both colonies are doing very well and have taken up nearly the entire space already! So we are a bit late in adding our supers. But it’s a good time to place them on top. We scraped off a little bit of comb from the top as we removed the lids. this will keep the bees busy where we want them, rather than building their own comb.
After clearing out extra comb, we placed a queen guard down so the queen bee could not access the supers. We don’t want her laying any eggs up there. Then we put the supers on. It’s really quite simple really. Last, we put the lid back on top. We will keep adding supers as the bees need them this summer.
