[Bonus] Short - Dr. Dewey Caron on Supering

[Bonus] Short - Dr. Dewey Caron on Supering

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Dr. Dewey Caron: Hi. I am Dr. Dewey Caron. I come to you from Portland, Oregon. I present another audio postcard on communication in my continuing series of once-a-month Beekeeping Today Shorts Podcast. Do you know what day it is today? Today is World Bee Day, a day that's very appropriate that we celebrate all of the things that are bees. The topic this month, supering, the management of adding boxes super to the brood nest, adding supers. For these audio postcards, I've been discussing communication on three levels: bee scientist to beekeeper, beekeeper to bee, and bee to bee.

Adding supers is expanding the living space of a hive, so we very much need to communicate to our bees that we have added space for nectar storage and ripening into honey. Our request to the bees, fill it up. Supering management has multiple options, of course, as does most of beekeeping. Timely supering can, one, greatly reduce warming, and two, supering may significantly increase honey yields. This presumes your beekeeping expectations are, one, you want to reduce warming, and two, you want more honey. Not all of us might want one or both of these.

Standard advice is, beekeepers should add a super early to capture the possibility of an early nectar flow. These don't happen each year, but if the hive only has brood boxes, that is where the nectar will go, and maybe, just maybe, contribute to congestion of the brood rearing area and heighten the possibility of swarming. Another, but less frequently, filed management is to super frequently, or more properly, with more than adequate empty super space because, one, we don't know how strong the nectar flow will be, or two, what is proper timing? Seasons vary one year to the next.

Anticipate. I want to emphasize in this podcast on supering, be proactive, anticipate. Challenge your colonies with management of supering. Tell them what you want. The 7/10 rule of beekeeping is a reactive guideline for determining when to add a honey super to a beehive. It suggests that a super should be added when bees have used 7 out of 10 frames with an existing super box. For eight frames, that would be six of the eight. Others state the same thing as the 80% rule, 8 of the 10. These rules help beekeepers provide the bees with adequate space to store honey before there is a possibility of overcrowding the honey storage area.

Waiting for the bees to tell you is mostly reactive. You react to what is happening. The opposite, proactive. We know the bees will need space to store and ripen nectar, so in anticipation, we super to challenge the bees, fill them up. Timing of supering, as in all beekeeping, is important. Beekeepers who fail to keep up with the storage needs of a colony can possibly lose harvestable honey, especially if the failure to provide space causes a swarming event. Of course, there always is a but. Adding too much space has negatives. There may be too much space that bees can't patrol, and possibly wax moth infestations or small hive beetle takeover may occur.

On this podcast, I will discuss terms over-under supering and top-bottom supering. The terms get mixed up. If you Google over-under supering, for example, AI gives you the information that I more properly would label top-bottom supering. What does AI know? The Bee Listener, a bee blog of Ann Collette from Scotland, asked the question, "Does it matter where you place the next shallow super during a nectar flow, above the first one or below the first one already on the colony?" I will use top-bottom supering as a bee science to beekeeper communication.

The scientists are the folks at the University of Georgia, specifically Jennifer Berry and Keith Delaplane. They asked the bees, "What was the best management in a two-season experiment over two nectar flows in Georgia in the US?" They set up three apiaries with 10 colonies in each. The brood box consisted of a single brood hive body, common in the south, and a shallow box of honey as honey stores above this. Supering was with drawn comb above a queen excluder. Colonies were equalized. They had the same amount of brood adult bees in stores at the start.

Treatment one, top supering, involved placing empty honey supers on top of honey super already on the hive. Treatment two, bottom supering, involved placing the next super below the one already in place, above the queen excluder. Supers were added as they were considered necessary to both colony groups according to the nectar flow. Which method of supering was best? The researchers found that there was no significant difference between the net weight results of the two study groups. Their results agreed with previous studies. There is no advantage to labor-intensive bottom supering over much faster, easier top supering. That's great news for our backs.

Since bottom supering means first lifting off existing supers on the hive, the heavy supers, truly for the very strong. Not for me. I'm too old and lack the muscle power I once had. Top supering for me, doesn't make a difference. There is, by the way, a third way to super. It is baiting. Baiting a super, you add a colony, as an excellent example of communication with our bees. To bait a super, we exchange one or two frames on which the bees are actively occupying, drawing foundation, and or ripening nectar. We place these frames in the middle of the box to be added with the clinging bees.

If we are adding a brand new box of foundation, move one or two previously drawn combs into the middle of the super we are going to add to the colony. The frames are exchanged for frames in the super we add. This proactive supering more quickly entices the bees into the super we add. The baited super usually is simply top supered, i.e., adding new baited supers on top of existing supers. An alternative is to make a mess. The term mess is a technical term here. It means scoring capped honey from a frame that you've removed from storage or a frame in a super already on the colony, or by dribbling honey or sugar water, both work as well, onto one or more frames. Make a mess.

The bees do not care for such messes, and they are drawn into the super to clean up the honey sugar water mess that we've made. Thus, you will communicate to your bees that you have added a new super. One question I frequently get when talking of nectar flows and supering is something along the lines, "I added a super to my colony, but the bees ignored it. Why? Why did the bees not move into the drawn foundation or in-store honey for me?" The question usually involves a brand new super with foundation, usually over a queen excluder, but not always. There is, of course, no single correct response to this bee mystery.

Rusty Burlew of Honey Bee Suite says there are three and a half necessities for bees to move into a super. The three and a half things are, one, the bees need a strong nectar flow. Honey bees need a plentiful sort of nectar, which can be supplemented by feeding sugar syrup to stimulate wax glands. Two, the bees must be completely out of shelf space in the brood area. In other words, the bees are foraging plenty of nectar, but they have no place to put it. Three, the temperature in a hive is warm enough for the bees to work the wax. The half? The half there is a plentiful supply of middle-aged young workers, especially those around two to three weeks of age.

In short, it takes bees, strong, populous colonies a situation when the bees need more room. Additionally, it takes resources of the flowering plants that are actively secreting nectar. It takes an age mixture of bees. Sure, enough foragers to go out to gather nectar, but also enough middle-aged bees that have to process that nectar in the hive. It takes heat. Adding supers too early may result in the bees ignoring the space. Even when conditions improve, they often then do not move into that added box. If those conditions are considered present, a possible additional failure to move in a super might be lack of bee smell, for example, new boxes, foundation, stored where it might be exposed to different odors that you then put in the frames will make the bees less likely to enter and start drawing a foundation.

Of course, in beekeeping, timing is everything. A good example of timing, bees do what we want, and are more forgiving if our mistakes happen during increasing day length.

Getting bees to move into supers is always easier before the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. It's more difficult not in the fall, i.e., when there is decreasing day length, unless there is a strong nectar flow, as might be due to blooming from golden flowers from goldenrod, sunflower, or asters. Feeding sugar helps ensure more winter stores, but it doesn't improve cell drawing under decreasing day length.

Once you have been keeping bees, you will likely have drawn comb. Bees are more likely to store in drawn comb cells. There is a hoarding behavior that kicks in with the drawn comb. The bees will be reluctant to draw a foundation, but when new or expanding, you may only be adding supers of foundation. If the nectar flow is less robust, feeding sugar syrup will help, especially in seeking to obtain drawn comb. Sometimes it takes somewhere on the order of 6 to 8 pounds of sugar to draw 10 combs of a hive.

If we are feeding bees to draw foundation, what's the best sugar supplement? Randy Oliver compared feeding heavy syrup versus light syrup as options for drawing comb. He found it did not make a difference. The syrup could be either light or more concentrated, although, of course, feeding a lighter syrup means feeding twice as much syrup to achieve the same level of amount of sugar. These are all examples of how communication is important.

Let's move to beekeeper to bee communication and talk about the over-under supering. As I explained, sometimes the meaning of terms get confused. Top supering means placing supers on top, over other supers, and bottom supering is adding supers below existing supers. Did you understand that? Top supering means on top of. Over-supering, on the other hand, means adding two or more supers at one time, adding more than is necessary at the time of supering. Bottom supering means adding a new super beneath supers already in place. Under supering means to reduce the number of supers or maybe just the frames in supers, so bees consolidate the honey stores and fully ripen the honey.

Over-supering in anticipation and begin of and then under-supering as a way to help consolidate to get the bees to make it more efficient for you as the beekeeper. Over-supering is communication. You are challenging the bees. The drawn comb is a stimulus to hoard. If you add two supers rather than a single one, the bees will store more nectar, as shown in studies. This is in the absence of space becoming limited. More comb equal more honey. Eventually, you may run out of drawn comb, and a nectar flow will run out. Under supering means reducing and consolidating supers or the frames in the supers you earlier added to the colonies, as a nectar flow is winding down.

We communicate to the bees. Consolidate. Use more fully the frames. Time to shut down. Stronger colonies may continue to find resources that the weaker colonies might not. Also, frames of slowly ripening honey can be removed and transferred to stronger colonies, so ripening honey gets capped in a more timely fashion, and we can then remove all the supers with frames of more fully ripened capped honey. This helps us remove all the supers at one time without concern for extracting too much uncapped honey of too high a moisture content.

Another question I get is, can you super a top bar hive or a longitudinal hive or hives with deeper frames like the Layens hives? Short answer, yes. I have added a reference on managing longitudinal or long hives by John Edwards of Portland, Oregon. Supering longitudinal hives means modifying the cover and, like all beekeeping, strong colonies that need the space. Follower boards help conserve the heat of the brood area in the long hive itself. It's a little bit harder with top bar hives because you have to modify the top bar so the bees can actually come up through the top bars. If you have a solid top bar top on a top bar hive, they just can't get up into the supers.

Finally, bee-to-be communication. There are numerous messages, chemical pheromones, and behaviors in a bee colony. Volatiles and empty comb are known to affect hoarding behavior in honeybees and stimulate them to store honey. Hence, over-supering is our response. Dance language, discussed in previous podcasts, is a marvelous means by which bees in a colony can find out about and consolidate their foraging on the richest possible sources. Bees tell their sisters about what is available out beyond the entrance of the hive, both in direction and a distance.

Foragers find it easy to recruit new foragers to the best sources rather to the poor sources and do more foraging for those sources as well. Intriguingly, each dancing forager possess an individual calibration to communicate the distance to flower resources. We think it's on energy expended, they can't measure distance like we would with meters or yards, et cetera. Distance is communicated by the sound production during the waggle portion of the dance, and we find that there is some variation.

Fascinating research by Laura McHenry and other students at Virginia Tech lab of Maggie Couvillon have looked at this misinformation. They discovered that dancers that provide recruits with distance information that is too far beyond the flower site have greater success in finding the forage source than those recruits following dancers who provide information too short or just at the site itself. Although research paper is behind a firewall, I recommend the Virginia Tech Press Release. This is referenced in the material. It shows bees dancing and has a spectacular photo of how the students mark every bee in an observation hive they've used to record the dancers.

For a follow-up homework assignment, I recommend you listen to the Honey Bee Obscura Podcast with Jim Tew. It's number 163. He has a great discussion on supering. Supering, the bee postcard for this month. I trust you are able to successfully communicate to your bees when you super that you have a major expectation of them. You want them to fill it up. We want to take it off filled. We want to tell them, "Fill it up, but fill it all up." Our bees do the hard work to fill the combs. We let them know our expectations and make it clear we have added supers. Are you ready to take on a challenge and this season be proactive in your supering management? Be well. Happy beekeeping.

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