honey super storage

Topic: Honey Production/Storage of Honey Supers

What do you do with honey supers after the honey has been extracted from them?

This is a question often ignored by beekeepers but for the commercial honey producer, it is very important because honey supers are valuable. Drawn comb in honey supers require less work for the honey bees to fill them with honey and thus, drawn comb in honey supers is a real asset.

It is a practice for some beekeepers to set wet honey supers out for bees to rob and clean up. This practice is often encouraged by hobby beekeepers but is also recognized as a way to spread disease. The commercial beekeeper has far too many supers to set up outside thus must find another better way to deal with them.

If honey supers stored with the wet honey still in the comb are placed on hives in the next honey season, bees will eagerly go into them much quicker than dry supers. This is a decided advantage for the beekeeper.

The usual practice is as follows:

As the frames from the extracting process are placed back into the hive/super body, the super is placed onto a pallet and when the pallet is full (usually a pallet will hold 4 box stacked six to eight high), it is treated with moth crystals and shrink wrapped in plastic. The pallets are then moved by forklift to the storage area and stacked again two or three pallets high. The shrink wrap does a very good job of holding the supers onto the pallet and the forklift allows the pallets to be stacked all the way to the ceiling of the storage facility which usually has twelve to sixteen foot ceilings. The honey supers are kept in weather tight buildings so they are not exposed to moisture or critters such as raccoon.

The major problems associated with comb storage:

Wax moths -- this is the reason for the moth crystals
Rodents -- the crystals discourage them as well but the beekeeper should bait the building with a proven rodent killer.
Raccoon like to get into a stack of supers, pull out frames, and build a nest to raise young. They can do considerable damage to frames.

Honey supers should not be moved during very cold temperatures. Jarring and movement may cause the fragile brittle comb in the frames to break. This is common with honey supers because the comb has never had brood raised in it and as a result do not have the cocoons from the pupa development to reinforce the comb as brood comb has.