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  • From: Phil DeGuzman <phil.deguzman AT gmail.com>
  • To: Randall Austin <ra41717 AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: "ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org" <ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [ocba] Splits and Supers
  • Date: Tue, 19 May 2015 11:34:44 -0400

Thanks Randall.

On bottom supering and the relationship to swarming...my past experience with a swarm was like this: two deep brood boxes that did looked appropriately populated -not overly full;  the bees had ample stores of honey in two mediums so I added another medium on top. They never really touched the top super and swarmed about two weeks later. So my thought experiment determined (in my mind) if I put the empty super in a place where the foragers cannot help but see available space, then they would preferentially use that space and there should be no need to swarm. I suspect that a swarm may occur from any number of conditions, overcrowding is possibly one of many reasons. So the actual experiment right now is to bottom super and hopefully they stay in place.

Thanks also for your thoughts on the summer split. I'll check out the webinar later tonight. My main concern is that I would rather not do too much sugar feeding--I've been keeping bees for about 4 years now and have had to provide sugar water to some degree every year...and my honey harvests have been disappointing tasting. So this year I am willing to take no honey if I can get them through the winter on their own resources. I'm really nervous about swarming so I am willing to make another split if they need the space, but I certainly don't want to put them in jeopardy during the summer dearth (and as I mentioned, would rather not resort to sugar water if I can help it).

Phil

On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 10:56 AM, Randall Austin <ra41717 AT gmail.com> wrote:
Phil,

My opinion is that in my area, making splits, catching swarms, installing packages, maybe even doing cut-outs after June 1st is a tough proposition. The cards are stacked against the colony, because they have to draw comb, gather stores and build up during a severe, long dearth. I often have splits "fail to thrive" if they go into summer and aren't already going gangbusters as "regular" hives by the time the dearth starts.

You can fight against that by feeding constantly but in my experience it often still ends up being a losing battle. If you have a full complement of brood comb already drawn out you will have much better chances.

Everybody's location is different -- even a few miles distance can affect things -- so you may have different results.

Dave Tarpy at NCSU did a webinar on this topic on 6/14/2012; the recording is <here>. If I remember correctly, it is more about the advantages of making splits and less about dealing with challenges.

I would love to hear from folks who have learned how to reliably make this work, not by luck or by extreme measures but by... ???

As far as bottom supering -- in my opinion, it all works. Sometimes I put the empties on the bottom (as long as there is a honey band underneath) and sometimes I don't. It is a lot more effort to check supers when you have to pull off five full ones to check the empty below. It seems logical that bottom supering is a good thing -- I certainly can't think of a reason that it would hurt anything. But I don't think it makes a real difference in the honey crop, and I don't see how the method would have anything at all to do with swarming.

The practice of bottom supering first came about back when most people were collecting comb honey. Bottom supering leads to cleaner, whiter cappings because the bees aren't walking over the same caps all the time to get to the top empties. If you are going for comb honey then bottom supering is certainly what you want to do. For extracted honey, gleaming white cappings don't matter.

Randall


On 5/18/2015 9:14 PM, Phil DeGuzman wrote:
Earlier this year (in Mid March) I made a split from a very healthy hive. The split seems to have "taken" and both hives are now humming along. I was in my hive this past weekend and have a couple questions/discussion topics that  I'd like to hear your opinions/experiences on:

Summer splits: no, not banana splits, but splitting a healthy beehive in summertime (as opposed to spring). I have read a few articles (I suspect written by folks from up north) who suggest that a split made in the summer months (June) are sometimes more successful than earlier splits. I am curious about this because I just added two more mediums on one of my hives (it has two deeps for brood box, plus there were two medium honey supers with about eight frames each nearly full of stores so I added a couple supers to give them elbow room (and to prevent swarming). with four mediums on top of two deeps the stack is getting taller than I am comfortable working...hence my question about splitting the hive in summer; I would consider a second split to prevent adding even more supers should the two I just added get full.

Now my second topic: bottom supering. One of my hives had two mediums pretty full of honey and I am nervous about swarming. So I added two super in a technique I have seen referred to as "bottom supering". So basically I took the two full mediums off the hive bodies, put two mediums of drawn comb on top of the hive bodies, then put the ful supers back on top. My rationale was that I wanted the workers to pass through the empty drawn comb so they would be more likely to use those empty frames. In the past, I have had issues in previous hives where if I added the new supers on top of full supers, the top supers just didn't get used as much as I expected and the hive swarmed.

Please share any thoughts, experiences, opinions or links to relevant articles. I have surfed a lot of different materials, but as I suggested above, much of the material is written by folks in other parts of the country.


--
"There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all." ― Peter F. Drucker


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