Supering Descriptive Transcript

Summary: Paul Kelly, research and apiary manager, instructs how to super a bee colony.

0:04 - 00:27
[The video opens with footage of someone adding a super on to a hive. The text “Supering” fades in. The screen cuts to a montage of seven shots showcasing honey bees and different elements of the research centre, ending with footage of a bee taking off from a yellow flower as the logo for the Honey Bee Research Centre fades in.]

00:27 - 00:44
[Cut to a wide shot of Paul Kelly in the apiary.]

Paul Kelly: 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.

00:44 - 01:21
Paul: So we will just have a look to see which hives need supers and how many. [Paul puffs smoke around two hives.] So we take the lid off, lean it against the back of the hive, take the inner cover off, set it on the ground. [Camera zooms in on inside of hive.] 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.

01:21 - 01:51
Paul: 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. [Paul places excluder on.] 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.

01:57 - 02:27
Paul: 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. [Paul pushes frames in the super to ensure even spacing.]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.

02:27 - 03:07
[Paul places cover and lid on top of super to close the hive as he speaks.]

Paul: 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.

0:03:10.020,0:03:12.000
Bit of smoke there. [Paul remove lid and inner cover from hive to reveal its interior.]

0:03:15.580,0:03:18.060
And how are these bees doing? [Camera zooms in on uncovered hive.]

03:19 - 03:33
Paul: 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.

03:33 - 04:21
Paul: 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.

04:21 - 04:36
Paul: 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.

04:36 – 05:41
[Paul walks over to another set of hives and puffs smoke around them. He removes the inner cover and lid to reveal the inside of the hive.]

Paul: 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 [Paul places queen excluder on hive.] and we add these supers one at a time so that we can make sure they are spaced nicely. [Paul places two supers on top of each other on the hive.] And this one has the self-spacers so that looks good and they are all hanging nice and plumb. Shake the bees off there [Paul shakes bees off of inner cover.] get our inner cover on and we'll close her up.

05:43 - 06:28
Paul: So that's all there is to supering for the first round. [Camera zooms out to medium shot of Paul speaking beside the hive.] 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 [Paul estimates hive height using his personal height.] mid-July and hopefully all full of honey by the end of July.

06:28 - 06:36
Paul: So that is supering and we'll be coming back a little later to talk about harvesting that honey. See you next time.