Beekeeping Made Easy

                      Strong hive management

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Hopefully, you now have a strong hive to work with.

The information in this lesson begins with a description of a strong colony of bees.   If your hive of bees fits the description below,  you can begin the management of it to fit this hives need, otherwise, you will need to continue to work on building your hives strength.

• A full strong hive of two deep brood bodies with a large population of bees reaches this stage when a queen has had an opportunity to lay over at least an eight week period, has a large population of nurse bees as well as forging worker bees, and a fair number of drones.   Not all queens are equal and hives develop as individual units and reach this peak at various times.    Management technique goals are to have hives reach this point prior to a honey flow so the hive can store the maximum amount of honey.  This isn't always possible because some hives enter the spring in a very weak condition and others are started from packages or nuc's.
• Things to look for to see if your hive fits what we think a strong hive should look like:
  • We are going to show you three pictures.   These pictures will illustrate 1} a weak hive   2} a strong hive and 3} a hive with too many bees and needs room to expand.

     

    • Weak hive    Notice that the bees do not cover all the frames.  They are clustered in one corner of this hive.   This is typical of a hive just coming out of winter into spring.   This hive needs time to develop the bee population necessary to add honey supers.    This hive also may need feed to encourage the bees to build a larger population.    If the queen is a year or two old, one might also consider requeening the hive.

 

Strong hive   Our example for a strong hive shows both deep boxes of the brood chamber.  Note that both boxes are full of bees.   This hive has some room but the bees need to have honey supers added now.  This hive has started building swarm cells.  We will discuss this problem in the management of bees for spring.

 

Crowded hive  I have never seen a hive of bees with so many  bees on the outside of the brood chamber.   This hive had bees clinging to all four sides of the hive.  The inside was crowded with bees.   Normally, a hive like this would have swarmed long ago.  Upon checking it, I found that it had swarmed.  It was filled with queen cells with young queens just emerging.  The original swarm evidently returned to the hive because the old queen was lost.  When one of these new queens developed enough to leave the hive, the swarm would go with her.  I quickly made three hives (splits) from this one hive and used the virgin queens running around inside the hive to requeen each of the new hives.  Adding supers to this hive would not have stopped it from swarming.

We are not going to give you any particular dates for this section for the following reason.

• Your hives reach this point based upon how you started beekeeping (packages, nuc, or full hive).  Many hives started with packages do gather good amounts of surplus honey so you need to determine when this particular stage of development is reached with your own hive/hives.

 A queen bee supported by as many as 60,000 worker bees will lay approximately 2000 eggs per day as long as nectar and pollen are being brought back to the hive by foraging bees.  Not only must the queen have a place to put eggs, the bees need a place to store the pollen and nectar.  If  additional supers are not added, the bees will store the nectar and pollen in the brood nest restricting the number of cells available for the queen to deposit eggs.   This crowding is recognized as one of the causes for the bees to start building swarm queen cells.  Once this process begins, it is hard to stop.   So what do you do?

1. Check your hive often (at least every two weeks).  There is no need to find the queen but you will need to put on your protective equipment and open up your hive.   You will need to determine the strength of your hive.  You can observe the following:
   1. How much foundation has been drawn out if this colony has new foundation in frames recently installed. Typically, the bees will draw out the foundation in the outside frames last.  If these frames are in the process of being drawn out, it is time to start adding honey supers.
   2.   If the combs seem to be well covered with bees as the  photo illustrate  and  you see many frames filled completely with sealed brood, you need to start adding honey supers.

1. If you see queen cells as shown to the left, you need to start doing something about the situation now.   First, you can make up several nuc's and use the queen cells to produce new queens for later use.   You could even make up a new hive.  (See queen cells below before you begin to cut queen cells)  Or you can cut out all the queen cells, move some of the brood above a queen excluder, add new comb to the brood chamber and add honey supers.  What is important is to open up the brood chamber so the queen can continue laying more eggs.  By opening up, I mean to remove any frames that are filled with honey and replacing them with drawn comb or foundation (this depends on several things which is discussed under spring management).  You can place a deep hive body above the queen excluder and move much of the capped brood above it, and replace the combs that you removed with frames taken from that deep super.

   Before you begin to cut any queen cells -- do you know the difference between swarm cells and supercedure cells?

   Swarm cells are usually located near the bottom of frames and appear almost like the queen cells as in the picture above.  If a hive of bees determines that the queen is failing for some reason, they will construct several supercedure cells on the face of the comb usually higher up on the comb.   If there are only three or four cells located in the center of a frame of comb, don't cut them out.   The bees are trying to replace their failing queen.   A hive constructing swarm cells will often have twenty or more of them.  They will be located at the edge of the comb either next to the end bar or bottom bar of the frame or in any opening which might appear in the comb of the frame.

   Supercedure is the process of a normal hive replacing an old or failing queen.  One might even find two queens in such a hive.   

2. Add supers if you are unsure of what to do!  It is always safe to add supers.  The bees will move up into them as needed.   However, do not add a whole stack of supers and decide that you do not need to check your bees anymore for quite awhile.   If you do this, you are on your way to becoming a "beehave-or".   Bees will sometimes put nectar only in the center of a stack of hive bodies and ignore the outside frames.   This is called the chimney effect.

1. Determine if a honey/nectar flow is occurring.   If one is occurring, add supers.
   1. Nectar flows (commonly called honey flows) occur during periods that plants are in bloom. For example, in Georgia the crimson clover blooming period arrives in early  April and is over by May.    In Ohio, the major honey flow from clover begins in May and continues to early June.   Determine what the honey plants are in the area around you bee location.
   2. If you pick up a frame of drawn foundation and shake it slightly, the nectar which has not been completely converted to honey will drop from the cells as small droplets. 
   3. The bees will be busy at work flying to and from the nectar plants.   There will be little robbing during such a time.  In fact, the bees may ignore sugar syrup being feed to them and concentrate on the nectar flow.
   4. If a nectar flow is over, you may notice more bees clinging to the outside of the entrance and not flying in the numbers that you saw earlier.   They will eagerly seek out any sweet source of sugar syrup and they will begin to rob weaker hives.  
2. Those of us who have kept bees for some time are well aware that not every year is the same.  For example, in Ohio, we can get a Black Locust honey/nectar flow that amounts to anything-- on average one year out of every five.   Some years are wet, some years are dry, and some years are just a combination of the two -- too much rain, and then no rain.    As a beekeeper you will need to observe weather patterns as well as study the nectar plants in your region of the country.
3. Now for the good news!     A good strong hive of bees at the start of a good nectar flow should fill a shallow super with 30 pounds of honey in just a few days time.  I have seen flows that produce 10 to 15 pounds of honey in a single day.   So how many honey supers should you have for each strong hive of bees.   Answer, I would suggest at least four shallow supers, three medium supers or two deep supers.  If you are using new foundation, it takes the bees more time to draw out the foundation and store honey in the cells.   Drawn foundation is a valuable asset in your efforts to keep bees.  You can reduce the number of supers on hand if you remove honey supers from the hive when they are full,  extract the honey from them, and then place them back on the hive.

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