Giving full supers back to hives

[scuttlefish]

Advice needed please - I've got four supers full of jelly-like heather honey which I've no wayof extracting (eleven collapsed frames from a fifth super proving that no matter how much I warm it I can't spin it out). I've no honey press, can't borrow one and don't have anywhere to set one up anyway. So I'm going to give it back to the bees.

I'm planning to just put the full supers on the hives in late March so the bees will use up the honey and empty the comb ready to fill with 'normal' honey later in the season. I'll add the QXs at the same time to stop the queens laying up the supers. The supers are numbered so I know which ones came off which hives.

Questions:
- should I add the supers over the crown board (& open the feed holes) to keep down the volume of hive area the bees need to heat and avoid chilled brood?
- is there any problem with giving full supers back this way?

 

[Graham40]

Get them on now one super per colony at a time,
take a fork and rake the faces opening the cappings up only do this to two frames to start with these opened frames should be situated directly over the nest area, the bees will get stuck into them fairly quickly. If theyve got brood in the nest and at this time of year they should be starting then they wont move upwards quickly especially if the frames are full.

Every week or second week open up another comb and rotate it into the position over the nest. you want to try and keep them down in the brood chamber and not laying in the super, however this is inevitable. Before you move the frame outward examine for eggs if there are eggs id just open another comb next to it, still if there are eggs at least you know mum's survived... unless its 2 eggs to a cell or eggs laid on the side of the side of the cell which means trouble.. ie a laying worker.

 

[smithhive]

Yes you can do as Graham40 suggests but why not place a queen excluder over the crown board and then the super on that. That way you keep the queen out of your supers and retain heat in the brood chamber.

The crown board holes should be covered except for a small gap - perhaps to allow 1 or 2 bees to pass at one time. This seperation of honey and brood nest seems to make the bees more willing to move honey down below.

One other thing, be prepared for a quick spring expansion if you feed them heather honey.

 

[Graham40]

Excluders are bad news in my part of the world at this time of year. If you put it on with the excluder there is a risk that the bulk of the cluster moves up leaving only mum and a few nurse bees down stairs if the weather turns nasty again which it can do in March the bulk go into a cluster upstairs leaving mum to freeze down below personally id sooner take the hit on the brood and a half and clean up later. I suggest leaving the excluder in the shed....... foundation costs less than a queen

Also the excluder might put them off venturing north

 

[smithhive]

No, the bees will not leave the brood and queen. They will take the honey down in the situation I have illustrated, i.e. with the crown board in place and a small gap left.

The problem you are thinking of could happen if you left a queen excluder in place over winter between fully adjoining boxes, i.e. broodless bees following the food up the hive.

They will now have some brood and your worry will not happen.

 

[Hivemaker.]

Excluders are bad news in my part of the world at this time of year.

He also said he was putting them on at the end of March, and lives in Tipperary,bit further south than Aberdeen.

 

[Graham40]

There's no problem doing as you suggest regarding heat loss, I've got stuck with a national brood chamber over a 14x12 as the weather caught us out before we had a chance to consolidate, its the strongest out of the lot, I will be doing a full inspection on it this weekend.

 

[Goran]

Some here use to work with "half boxes" of lang which is used in their beekeeping. In a late summer-autumn they put the supper with honey below brood box and bees cannot stand the honey below the brood, lift the honey up and make honey cap above a brood the way they want it. They says so, I don't use that half box - yet

 

[Finman]

I'm planning to just put the full supers on the hives in late March so the bees will use up the honey and empty the comb ready to fill with 'normal' honey later in the season.?

The system will not work, because bees do nothing to that honey and vain box makes the hive cold and makes spring build up slow.


I have writen few times on this forum what are alternatives to handle these crystallized honey frames.

First you must wait summer that hives are so big that they have supers, that when bees clean those combs, they have place where to move the honey.

Bees clean them when you use combs as brood frames. Then bees partly use the honey and partly mix it to new honey.

http://www.beekeepingforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=15317&highlight=crystallized&page=3

http://www.beekeepingforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=20068&highlight=crystallized

.

 

[scuttlefish]

Thanks all for the advice.

 

[scuttlefish]

An update - I gave a super full as above back to each of the three surviving hives in mid-late March. Set up was a QX over the feeder/crown board (holes open) and super on top of that.

At first inspection last Saturday, the bees had uncapped and emptied a couple of frames in each super. The weather from adding the supers to inspection was cold (0 - 8 degrees C) and/or wet enough to prevent or limit foraging. So in those circumstances the bees obviously are inclined to go up through crown board and QX to access capped honey.

Just thought I'd share given the conflicting opinions on this.