When to add a super or second brood

 This post is titled “When to add a super”. However it could accurately be called when not to add a super. 

At Woodside Apiary we take great care to ensure that our nucleus colonies are healthy, headed by a well mated queen and ready to expand quickly when transferred  Into their new full sized hive. This doesn’t mean a complete full sized hive including super or supers. The nucleus colony is a small beast, a baby. They need to be kept warm and fed well. The bees of course are well able to take care of themselves. We beekeepers can make their lives easier or harder!

A good nucleus colony on five or six frames will be well covered with bees and have brood in all stages. This brood must be fed and kept warm ......... When transferred to a full sized brood box with a crown board above the heat from the brood nest will rise, and spread outwards under the crown board, cool a little and fall, warming the adjacent foundation frames, thus enabling the bees to work these new frames, drawing new comb. 

It can be tempting to “stick a super on” at the same time as transferring the nuc. The bees now, keeping the brood nest warm have the heat escape upward and up again, through the queen excluder, through the super (or heaven forbid, a second super) cooling all the time. By the time that this once warm, humid air returns to the lower hive area (the brood box) it is cold and probably damp! The bees now have to work extra hard to try and rewarm this air to maintain the required brood temperature. The result: the growth of the colony that was ready to explode in numbers, build new comb and take advantage of the coming nectar flows to give us their keepers a honey surplus is thwarted. 

It is much better to match the hive volume to that of the bees, this is why our hive systems have multiple boxes after all. Allowing the bees to expand into the new available space a step at a time alows them to grow at their optimal rate. A layer of insulation above the crown board helps enormously too, conserving the heat of the rising air and maintaining the relative humidity, minimising the work that the bees have to do to maintain their brood nest and giving them the opportunity to expand quickly. 

Once the bees have drawn all fondation frames and there is a nectar flow on we can go ahead and add a second box containing foundation frames. If this is a brood box, moving a frame containing open larvae, encourages the bees to move up quickly. If we are expanding with a super, some drawn frames will help, if we have some. Beekeepers that do have super comb already drawn can add two supers.