Add a second super....or not?

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Nick Lang

House Bee
Joined
Oct 30, 2020
Messages
184
Reaction score
81
Location
Pontypool, South Wales
Hive Type
National
Number of Hives
Only one
Howdy folks.....

so.....my original hive has been pretty busy lately and they have a super on....it has about six frames of almost full drawn comb and each frame is half capped...the lower part not capped yet....two more frames are drawn and filling up...the outer two frames are being drawn.
my second hive which was a split from the original earlier this year has a super on it ..but they haven't used it...they aren't even going into it....should I take off this super?

The other question is...should I add another super on the hive...or should I just leave it at one....also does a second super go underneath or on top?

ta muchly 😁
 
One criterion is the number of bees in the hive. A rule of thumb used to be 'when 3/4 of the super frames are full of honey' add the next super. More recently folk suggest 'when every seem in the super is occupied by bees' add the next super - I follow the latter.
 
Bees naturally fill from top down (theoretically). If the top super is full put the next below it (Edit: i.e. Always the bottom of the pile of shallows). This also means that you can clear them down out of the filled super more easily if you need to extract it earlier than subsequent ones.
 
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