Beekeeping | When And How To Add Your Honey Super

i'm really fired up about today's video when to add another honey super when to add the first one one of the biggest questions i get asked all the time when do you add the honey super today we're gonna answer that because on this one timing is everything look if you add it too soon the bees may never go up there and draw it out if you add it too late the crowded hive is going to swarm and you're going to lose half of them also i'm going to look at how to do it do you top super or do you bottom super and if you don't know those two terms please watch this video those are crucial we'll also look at three different types of frames that may produce different results on how much nectar and honey that you actually get finally we'll answer the question is a queen excluder really a honey excluder like a lot of bee clubs say all this and more starting right now [Music] let's get right into it when do you add a super when you have five frames that are filled out in your bottom deep i suggest you add your second deep and then when that second deep has five frames filled out and i mean wax drawn and some bees on it it's time to add your honey super always err on the side of adding your honey super a tad bit early i don't mean crazy early like you don't want to just add a deep throw your new package in there and then put five supers on it that's not going to work you want to get the bees up in that second deep pretty established with five frames of wax drawn out before you add your super but once you have five i really think you need to add that super right away because usually that time of the year is when bees are really bringing in some nectar they have to turn nectar into wax how do they do that listen up here's how it happens bees have to actually consume nectar they they use it for fuel they eat it and when they eat it bees that are between 12 and 17 days old have wax glands below their abdomen and when they consume that nectar then they're able to produce from these wax glands wax flakes that they use throughout the hive to build their comb holy moly so the first year beekeeper really doesn't expect to have a lot of excess honey because bees are turning a lot of the incoming nectar right into wax to stretch out to build out that comb on your frames but that second year beekeeper look out because you've got your wax pulled out now bees are going to be able to turn that nectar right into honey but i realize many of you are brand new beekeepers this year you're probably starting with brand new equipment you may not have any honey supers that have drawn out comb on it so this is what we're gonna do i'm gonna say you need to add your honey super when you have five frames drawn out in your deep box add the honey super the worst thing you can do is add it too late by adding it too late a couple of things can go wrong if you add it too late the bees can become overcrowded and they can swarm and you can lose half of your colony or if they don't swarm and you add it too late that colony could have made a lot more honey for you they just didn't have anywhere to put it you lose when either of those things happen now the next question is how do you do it it doesn't seem to be that complicated but what comes into play is the queen excluder when do you add your queen excluder or should you even use a queen excluder the best way to look at it really is that if you're a new beginner and you're not comfortable with manipulating your queen by picking her up and moving her around you better use a queen excluder and so i suggest that you would add your honey super but first lay down that queen excluder put the queen of scooter on top of that top deep box whether it's your first one or your second one so when you get your second deep on it's time to add the honey super if you're a new beginner and you're not used to handling your queen moving her down go ahead and put that queen excluder on your top deep box and then put the honey super right on top of the queen excluder and then put your inner cover or top cover on it's better that way because you don't want eggs up in your honey soup now the way that the queen excluder works is it has small enough openings that queens cannot pass through only worker bees pass through the queen's thorax and abdomen a little bit too large to go through the queen excluder workers can go through there just fine which brings me to a pet peeve of mine it's called a queen excluder because it excludes the queen from passing through into the super many beekeepers will call it a queen extruder they say the word extruder it's not an extruder an extruder is a play-doh machine you had when you were a kid and you put play-doh in the little device and you would put different filters on the end and when you smash the lever it would actually push the play-doh out through those little star-shaped images triangle or separate them into a lot of different pieces you don't want to extrude your queen or she will be in many pieces smashed so don't say queen extruder it's a queen excluder some people may have noticed in my videos that i rarely use a queen excluder it's because i'm very comfortable handling my queens we raise queens i'm playing with queens a lot i got her picked up gonna grab her back two legs to hold her stationary while i mark her i got my marking pin ready i'm gonna put a little white dot on her and just for kicks i'm gonna throw her in a queen cage my hands are sticky there she goes in the cage 60 seconds marking a queen and so it's i'm comfortable moving the queen down when she rises up and starts to get into my honey supers so for me what i do is i put my first honey super on above my two deeps i don't use a queen excluder i allow my bees to go up in there and i allow my queen to go up there if she has to i'm hoping that she's not what i'm hoping that will happen is that my bees will actually add nectar into that honey super before the queen has a chance to get up there she looks at every cell she lays an egg in so if she sees those cells are starting to be filled with nectar she does not lay an egg there and she'll go back down now once i get that established i may have to run her back down a little bit in the beginning so i'll put my super on i'll wait five days i'll go back in i'll look at the frames i'll look for eggs or the queen if i sear i just gently pick her up and move her back down to the brood nest area that gives my bees more time to put nectar into that top super and then she won't go up there anymore this is what happens in nature bees living in trees they have their brood near the opening they have their honey up above i think it's a defensive measure on behalf of the bees let's say a wasp wants to come in and steal some honey they have to go through 40 000 beads through the brood nest area before they can find the honey the honey is never close to the door it just wouldn't be wide i will leave my honey super in that position forever that brings us to another question do you top super or bottom super i think you can do either way very successfully for me personally since i don't like to use queen excluders i top super because i've already put my super right above the brood nest area and they're already filling it up with nectar and that's going to keep my queen down it becomes my natural queen excluder the queen is not coming up and passing through that first level of super that's filled with nectar she'll go back down that allows me to put more of my supers on top and hold my queen down and generally that works for me every time again if you're not comfortable handling your queen picking her up keeping her in the brood nest area i recommend you use a queen excluder above your two deep brood nest boxes in that case you can bottom super if you want to you see if i bottom super what happens without a queen excluder the queen's gonna go up into that that new super that's below my one that's already starting to be filled that makes sense and so i like to top super but by all means if you're using a queen excluder you can bottom super the idea of a bottom supering is that the bees are passing through a brand new super trying to get to one that's not quite finished yet and along the journey they may decide to stop there and fill that one up as well it may work it may be a wash either way you do it i just have a personal preference and my way is not always the way that you have to do it or the best way it's just a preference of mine we're gonna talk about frames now because sometimes the frames that you use make a big difference on how fast the bees can draw the frames out and add nectar and turn that nectar into honey and your supers before we do that though let me take a moment to thank you for watching so far we've got a lot more content coming up especially coffee time i'm really excited for you to watch my coffee time at the end of the beekeeping part of this video i hope you'll stick around but i want to say thank you so much i view you as a valuable person i really appreciate you watching my video i view you as a friend you guys are awesome thank you for supporting me so much please give me a thumbs up if you've liked this content so far and subscribe click on the bell to be notified each time we make make a new video i really appreciate it now let's get right back into the video let's talk about three frames three frames that are commonly used in beekeeping now the one piece plastic foundation the plastic foundation with the wood frame and then a drawn comb that was used last year and it's been extracted and now it's an empty comb fully drawn out those are the three frames that we want to talk about and how you use them in your honey supers now there is a fourth one not going to spend but just a second to let you know about it and that is it's a wooden frame but it has wax foundation wax foundation is a thin sheet of wax it has embedded wires in it and you if you use those you'll know they're a lot of work compared to the wood frame with a plastic insert i want to show you types of frames that we have today uh like i said there's i i call it three types but we have the all plastic one piece plastic it's the the rib everything the top bar side bars foundation one piece i like these they work out really well for me i have no complaints for the one piece plastic frame similarly there is the wood frame now this is what i prefer the most it's a wood frame with the plastic foundation inserted into it i love these they're handy they're easy to use it's the only thing that i do use anymore i do have some plastic foundations uh plastic frames when i used to buy them and use them so they're still out there being used today you'll see them in my videos they do fine on these frames that are wood with a plastic foundation it makes them last a long time you can pop these little pieces of plastic out buy a new piece if you want to take them out clean them up put them back in a wax moth won't destroy these plastic foundation inserts like this they go right back in the wooden frame and they're really nice i use these in my deep bodies uh full size deep frames and these super sized medium frames love both of them a lot now let's get into the hive and i'll show you how to add super well don't go anywhere i've got an exciting coffee time coming up in just a second where i reminisce about what it was like when i was growing up in the 60s and 70s and i'm gonna show you how important it is that we continue to live in the present moment first thing you always want to do is smoke the hive good raise out the top cover just a little bit if you've got some bees that are pretty defensive then you want to use more smoke than normal i've got a cicada video coming up explaining what's going on with the 17-year generation 10 cicada watch for that so now that we have this colony going pretty solid we're going to add a honey super and in my case i'm going to add a honey super that already has drawn out comb here's a honey super it's got some drawn out comb from when i harvested out the honey last year okay so if you're starting out as a new beginner bee keeper you want to use a queen excluder because until you get more experience in picking up your queen and handling her it may kind of freak you out so once your hive gets the second deep with about five frames that are drawn out then you want to add your queen excluder you simply lay it down on top of your deep box like that give it a little push around the edges to help it seal down better now you know the queen is below there next you want to add your honey super simply lay it right on top of the queen excluder and drop your top on it's as simple as that now if you want to do it the way i do it and not use a queen excluder maybe you have a little more experience in handling your queen what i'm going to do is just put my honey super on here now and then in five days i'll come back i'll give it a look through make sure the queen's not up there without putting the queen excluder on there this may speed up my hive's ability to draw up into this super stretch the comb out and then add nectar and eventually cap it over with honey the downside of that is my queen could come up there before the nectar does and so sometimes the queen might lay eggs in the freshly drawn out comb and that's why in five days i'm going to drop back in here take a look see if the queen's up there and if she is i'm going to pick her up by her wings and i'm going to drop her into the bottom board or into a lower deep so that she can start over laying eggs down below again and not be tempted to come up here meanwhile my bees will cooperate and begin drawing the comb out and putting nectar in those cells and the next time the queen may drop up there to take a look guess what it's going to be nectar in there and she won't be able to lay in the egg now since this is my super that i'm going to leave on there kind of leave it on about forever i'm going to leave it on there all summer and even in the winter it's going to be my queen excluder by nature in other words when the queen walks up here and sees it's where the honey is stored she knows she can't lay eggs in the honey area of the colony so she's gonna have to find open cells in the brood area to lay her eggs so it's gonna force her to go back down allowing me to continue to put more supers on top i can put seven or eight more up here and the queen's never gonna go up past this one here because it signals her that the honey is above and the broodness is below now if i were to bottom super in this scenario what would happen is the queen would lay eggs in the super that's just right above the brood nest area unless i use a queen excluder but since i don't like using queen excluders this is my way of letting this become my queen excluder and so therefore i don't have to bottom super i just keep putting supers on the top and it makes it much easier if i have five supers here and a bottom supering i'm going to take five supers off and put one on the bottom and i don't know if you've lifted a full honey super yet but it weighs probably between 30 and 60 pounds one box pretty heavy stuff so you want to make sure to make it as easy as possible and that's another reason i like the super on top much less labor intense process and if you use a queen excluder it is going to slow down the bee's abilities to go up through it both to draw the comb out and to put the nectar in there as they bring it in from their foraging trips cicada again i'm thoroughly enjoying being outdoors tonight the evening is beautiful here one of the benefits of living outdoors in the country in illinois beautiful evenings very comfortable and we may have our harsh winters but boy spring summer and fall it's worth every moment of it and i was just kind of thinking about what happened a few days ago and i kind of wanted to tie it into a bit of encouragement for you i was at a big event a competitive event over the last weekend and there was a about 300 people there competing and i was one of them and at one of the places that i was at there was a young man there probably eight to ten years old and he looked like he was kind of bored just sitting there so i you know went up to him and i said hey how you doing you know what are you what are you doing here and he's like oh i'm here with uh my cousin he's over there and he pointed to one of the officials a young young official maybe 20 30 years old and i was like oh okay cool and it's like do you play video games what do you do and he's like sometimes when i'm at my cousin's house i was like cool do you have video games at home and he was like no i don't play video games i was like oh well what do you do for fun and he said i play outside and i was like all my buddies and friends were kind of standing around there waiting with me and i said they were kind of listening and i said wow you're like a 1960s kid and they all laughed you know because back in the 60s and 70s when i grew up you know we played outside and it's not to say that you know that being indoors and playing video games i know a lot of parents are kind of hard on kids these days once you go outside and do something when i was a kid i had to dig a hole i had to mow the yard i had to paint the house and uh you're just sitting around doing nothing but it is a little different than that kids are you know we if we had video games when i was a kid that's what i would have been doing i mean we used to go to arcades remember we had these um early introductions of video games when i was a kid uh that were kind of like screams that just kind of rolled and they kept rolling by and they were the same thing but it looked like you were moving and you weren't i mean just you know wow low tech but for the most part as a kid growing up in the 60s and 70s i played outside out of boredom there wasn't anything to do inside and so inside we had one television that was mostly black and white until i was a little bit older and we finally got the first colored television set and boy it was not i mean don't think it was anything like what you see now because it wasn't you could barely tell that gilligan had an orange shirt on or a blue shirt i mean you couldn't hardly tell it on gilligan's island but anyway it was a step toward seeing something more realistic than just black and white and we only had three stations you know abc cbs nbc maybe public television and we didn't have a lot of shows to watch we had some of our favorites i know i'm talking to some of you guys and gals out there you know we did have the brady bunch the monsters uh we did have gilligan's island um gosh we had you know i love lucy we had andy griffith we had some shows that we watched carol burnett show and uh as we got a little older we might stay up and watch johnny carson his monologue or something we had shows but boy they were nothing like what we have today with you know internet television by any stretch of the imagination another thing that was different about growing up when i grew up was that we weren't desperately poor but by no means did we have a ton of money and my brother and my sister both older than me we didn't get a lot of things during the year i mean we would get we would have decent clothes we couldn't get everything we wanted but you know my mom and dad kept us in shoes and pants and shirts and coats and so on but during the year like if you wanted a toy a special toy wasn't gonna happen because then you got all your cool toys at christmas and i think that's why christmas for people my age holds a real sentimental value a real importance in our lives as adults now because when we were kids that's kind of when we got the bulk of all of our toys i mean you on christmas morning you know before i got daylight we got all of our toys all of them in one 30 minute tearing open the present moment for the whole year that was about it now on your birthday you got kind of some a night a couple of nice things but nothing like christmas christmas christmas is when you got your bike it's when you got that new skateboard that's when you got that new gi joe jeep i mean it was it was just something magical about christmas is because wow that's when we got those awesome toys that we could play with all year long and so it was just magical and that's interesting to kind of think back about how different we are now with how kids are different now than they were when we were kids and what kids have today kids do get a lot more toys during the year and let's face it there's just a lot more toys we didn't have any digital toys growing up none digital toys weren't part of the landscape back then we had more mechanical toys you know uh toys that were more like um an army helmet uh a barbie doll we had more like practical things that you know you could you could do and it was just i mean they were cool and fun you know battleship battle is that what the name of that little game was battle station battleship where you kind of bomb another side of the panel like b4 and your bomb would hit near his ship you know that was fun but we had stuff like that not not high-tech digital things in the 60s or 70s and i guess reminiscing about all of those things in the past brings us to a point where all of us when we start talking that way when i get around people my age and we start talking about those days it's so hilarious i mean instantly we all begin singing gilligan's island like we know it by heart i mean it's amazing how people loved those shows and they loved everything about them and they were a little dorky when you watch them now you're like ooh wow and every time i mention you know like gilligan's island to some of my buddies they'll be like what do you think ginger or marianne which one was better looking it's just like it left such an impression on youngsters didn't it gosh those people stuck on that island you know we kept thinking every saturday they were going to get off and they weren't but it was just a mystery and by the way i think marianne was the better looking one cuter anyway um so when you look at that you look at your past and you remember some cool things about your past right and you're like oh i remember those days and another one of my buddies said you know what when i when i was a youngster i graduated from high school i went into the army got out of the army became a mechanic retired as a mechanic never made more than x amount of money and that was my life and he said back then you could do that you could go to school you could get a job out of school and you could it wasn't like you had to have you know a college degree you could get a job and raise a family right out of high school if you wanted to you could find that kind of job i mean it's amazing it's not the case today it's hard today you have to have a college degree and and more to find a a a job that pays well enough for you to pay your bills and live i would say a middle class life it takes a lot of money it didn't seem like it took a lot of money back then gosh i remember i had a job when i was in high school uh as a junior or a senior i worked half a day i was on some kind of work program so i worked half a day in a factory went to school the other half of the day and i think i was pulling in nearly a buck and a half two bucks an hour and that was a lot of money back then that was like 1977 or eight nearly two dollars an hour whoa the price of gas i don't know if i remember but i think it was right at a buck sixty eight that that kind of comes to my mind so i would have to work an hour for one gallon of gas is that right yeah i'd work about an hour for a gallon of gas and that seems weird now if you work an hour you can buy more than one gallon of gas right nobody a gallon of gas let's say is around three dollars a gallon and you work an hour you're not going to make three dollars an hour today that's not even minimum wage so today uh i i could um think that we could work an hour let's say let's say you make 10 bucks an hour and that's gonna get you three gallons where when i worked an hour it only got me one gallon that's interesting i'm gonna have to think of more about that leave comments below if if i'm confused about that and straighten me out about economy because it seems like we're better off now i don't know but things are so different some things are cheaper to buy you know like when i was a kid if you were gonna buy a television set you bought this gigantic television i mean it wasn't a very it wasn't a very big screen but it was in this gigantic wooden oak you know cabinet with big legs on it and some of them had a turntable like a stereo uh vinyl album player in the top of them too they were so big and they were a fortune i mean they were hundreds upon hundreds of dollars back in the 60s and 70s for one of those things and remember when they broke down we had a guy where i lived i grew up in uh got a little older around 70s i grew up in paris illinois and there was a man there it's interesting but he was our water softener guy we lived down the country and we had to have water softened so we had a water softener gentleman he was also our tv repair guy back then people could make a living repairing a television man that tv goes bad today the thing's only this thin it's only a hundred fifty dollars for the television it lasts ten years and by time you're ready to repair it it's so outdated you wouldn't think about putting any money in it even if somebody could repair it which i don't think they do anymore you just buy a new tv but back then you would repair the television he would come in and he'd he would have like a whole bucket of tubes you know big tubes little tubes and he'd had him he'd have a mirror set up where he could get back behind that television and he would start turning and popping these uh tubes in and out you know and he'd finally get the right one get a little better he'd be looking trying to dial that scene in oh my gosh and my dad mom and dad were biting their nails you know because back then if it was a picture tube all life was over i mean if it was a picture tube it was going to be millions of dollars to them to think about getting that replaced and watch tv again they were just gonna have to do without johnny carson at night my mom loved him watching him he was so funny so it was just funny back then how we lived our life you know uh and gosh we had one television then i remember when i was growing up i'd hear some people say they had two tvs or three tvs and it was just like gosh are you insane to have four tvs in your house why do you need four tvs for but now i think there's a tv you know i i stay at different places that like bed and breakfasts or if you rent a house you know like a beach house or something they've got a tv in every room that you go into it's kind of interesting big difference in in times and how things are so different now and i'm sitting outdoors i've got some very inexpensive lights on my face and behind me and you couldn't buy those when i was a kid i mean i was into photography as a kid didn't have cool stuff like this and i sure couldn't afford it and wow i mean the technology that we have today is just phenomenal for the price it really is but my point is if we reminisce about the past and my buddy that said he went into the army got out became a mechanic made a living doing that he said america will never be like that again you won't ever be able to do that again and it's sad to think that it's it won't come back to that it's gone but i remember sherry's dad he had he was in the navy he got out of the navy and you know came home to paris raised a family and um he actually had a job as a fireman it wasn't a volunteer fire department it was a paid position as a fireman and you know he worked i don't know the schedule he was like on 24 hour call two or three days off two days you know he had a schedule something like that on the days he he was off he did everything um i'm i'm amazed he worked at a gas station back then you pull in to a gas station and people would run out to your car they'd ask you how much gas you want you tell them like give me five dollars you know they would they would fill it up for you and they would wash your window while the thing's filling up i remember they had like um some of the gas stations when they washed the windows i was a little kid then but my mom and dad would you know be sitting in the front seat windows rolled down and they'd washed the windows the windows had this kind of a a watered-down gas smell which made me think they put a little bit of the gas in the water that they used to wash the bugs off of the windshield i don't know if that's how they did it but it smelled like that to me um but we would just sit there and wait they'd you want me to check your oil i mean they'd check your oil put another cord in there if you were low or something they checked your tires well anyway sherry's dad did that too even though he was a full-time firefighter and he was a butcher at a grocery store he cut meat and one time he would drive around and refill candy machines i mean back then when you have a big family you have to do a lot of jobs like that and gosh he did them all it's amazing sherry's mom didn't work that was pretty common back in those days dad did all the work and mom stayed home took care of the family made the meals and all never go back to those days they're still not to say that that was bad or this is better i'm not saying that i'm just saying that's the way it was and it holds a special place in a lot of our minds and a lot of our hearts not everybody but it holds a special place to a lot of us now if we want to we can get sentimental reminisce and get stuck in our past what good is that all right what good is that it was good that we had a pass that we look back on fondly and we think wow that was cool i love that i wish we could do that again i wish i wish every town could be like mayberry rfd but i want you to think about this don't get stuck in your past the past was great it got us to where we are now in the present but we need to move on out of our past don't sit around and think i don't like my present situation because it's nothing like my past i don't think that's the right attitude we should say i need to learn to love the present situation i'm in because back then our past was our present situation when we were in it when we were living it it was our present moment now is our present moment and we should be really enjoying these moments and you know just relishing every second that we have to live right now in this period of our existence and build memories and and when we get into the future we'll be like hey remember back in 2021 back then it was so funny we had this and we did that we used to hold these little things up to our head and talk on these phones now now we have it embedded in our eyes or something we used to we just had to drive our cars around now we don't we just jump in and say take me to california and we just wait for our car to get there i don't know what's going to happen but i'm saying we've made a lot of advancements it's going to be different in the future but we always have to love our past i appreciate where we've been what it made us but we also really need to be focused on the present moment here we are right now that's all we can do um i'm filming this at night i'm tired i want to go to bed and go go to sleep i don't know if i'm going to wake up in the morning this may be all i have right now this moment and then it will be gone so we have to live every moment like it's our i wouldn't say our last moment but like it's our only moment the past is over the future not here yet no reason to worry about that or regret that we just need to live right now and enjoy it it's fun to talk about the past i did like gilligan's island not sure if i'd like it now i've got other shows that i like i think better i'm moving on i'm i'm embracing other things now so i hope you'll be the same way this is sort of a coffee time but i don't want to drink coffee late at night before i go to bed it probably won't bother me i do that sometimes and i sleep fine but i just want to have a chat with you to encourage you we had some good times but now i think we're having better times i think we're having some fun times now and if we're not let's start let's say hey that was good this is better it's going to get better and my future is bright i'll see you next time

Channel: David Burns

Views: 65,691

Keywords: Beekeeping, bee removal, bees, bottom supering, david burns, different honey frames, honey bees, how much does a honey super weigh, how to add a honey super, how to start beekeeping, queen excluder, top supering, when to add a honey super

Id: rxrxjpkV5sQ

Length: 37min 39sec (2259 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 15 2021