[music]
OK so here we are in the bee yard.
It's the middle of May and we're
supering our colonies.
Bees came through pretty well this year,
but it is kind of a slow spring.
Sometimes we are supering as early as the beginning
of May, but this year now is the appropriate time.
So we will just have a look to see which hives need
supers and how many.
So we take the lid off, lean it against the
back of the hive, take the inner cover off,
set it on on the ground.
OK, I can see this one's got bees right from the
outside frames all the way over to the outside
frame here.
It's not super populous but it's ready for one super,
so that'll be fine we'll add a super there.
We've got bees pretty well one side of the
box to the other.
So the first thing we'll do before putting the super on
is put an excluder in place.
If there's any bends at all to the excluder
we would put it with the bent side down.
Sometimes they get bent a little bit from prying them
off, but we want them in this orientation.
If they are the other way around they will push
the frames up in the honey supers and so we
want that in the orientation where the bend is down.
We get it on nice and square and then we
add a honey super on top of that.
When you are putting the supers on if you grab
opposite corners then you can get it squared
up nicely.
We can see the frames are not lined up properly
so we need to space them manually.
Some of our supers have self spacing frame
rests in them.
This particular one doesn't, but we want to
get those nice and evenly spaced so the bees
draw out the comb nice and evenly and
it's easy to uncap and to harvest.
So that one just gets one super, wasn't
excessively populated so one will be enough,
and we are going to come back and check
on this in another week or two to see how well
the bees are doing with that one super.
If that one super is half full of honey,
we'll give it another one; if it is three quarters
full of honey we'll give it two more;
if it is right full of honey we'll give it three or
maybe even four more supers.
So we judge how many the colony needs based
on how they perform with the first one that we give them.
Let's check out another hive.
Bit of smoke there.
And how are these bees doing?
A little bit more populated than the last time,
but not a lot different.
You can see there are frames full of honey right
to the outside, bees right from one side
to another, so we'll give that one one super as well.
So we'll do the queen excluder first.
See how we've got the bode side down?
It's kind of bent there so we've got that bode
side down, we get it nice and square and then we
add the super
and we just feel from corner to corner to make
sure it is on it's nice and straight.
Now this box has frame rests in here that are
notched so the frames are spaced automatically,
but we still have to check to make sure the frames
are hanging plumb that they are hanging vertical.
If they are hanging at different angles we get
extra comb built in the middle which we don't want.
So that's got that super on there.
Before you put your inner cover back on
we don't want to crush those bees so we'll
just that a little bit of a shake on the ground,
set the inner cover back on, get it on nice and straight
too and there we go, that one's ready to go and
again we'll come back and check in a couple of weeks.
Let's have a look at this hive.
OK right yeah there's more bees here,
you can see all these bees on the inner cover there.
It's quite packed full of bees inside there,
so we're going to give that one two
honey supers, but we don't want to crush
any bees here so we kind of wiggle that down
into place and we add these supers one at a
time so that we can make sure they are
spaced nicely.
And this one has the self spacers so that looks good
and they are all hanging nice and plumb.
Shake the bees off there get our inner cover on
and we'll close her up.
So that's all there is to supering for the
first round.
The second round of supering again we judge
how much more space they need by how well
they've done with the supers that we've given.
Bit of an art. You have to be watching what's
happening with their nectar flow and also
be considering when you are going to be
harvesting your honey.
You don't want to be adding a lot of boxes
on just prior to harvesting or the bees
won't get the honey ripened well.
So once we get close to the date we are
planning to harvest our honey we ease up
a little bit on adding supers, but on a good
year the hive will end up being this high by
mid July and hopefully all full of honey by the
end of July.
So that is supering and we'll be coming back a
a little later to talk about harvesting that honey.
See you next time.