Wet Storage

With the honey crop extracted the supers need to be stored over winter. I used a couple to house feeders but most of them went to the out apiary for storage.

Behold: The sticking power of propolis

You can store supers dry or wet. This refers to whether they still have residual honey in the combs (wet) or if the bees have picked them clean (dry). What you choose is up to you but the advantage of storing them wet is waxmoth don't like honey whereas the advantage of storing them dry is they're less messy to handle although the honey may attract other pests. Obviously you can't sterilised wax honeycomb with a blowtorch. The usual method is to use acetic acid fumes. You pop a plate with a pad soaked in acetic acid at the top to the stack then close them up. The acetic acid evaporates killing pretty much anything living in the supers.

Acetic acid pad

I stacked up 16 supers in two lots of eight under a lean to I'd attached to one side of my shed. The hive roofs on each stack protrudes from under the lean to a bit so I used plastic shopfitting material I pulled from a skip to direct rain away.

Won't open these for a few months.

Super Trolley

Honey supers weigh a fair bit when they're full and being a 46.5 cm square that needs to be kept level they're a bit of a pain to move. Not a huge problem with one or two supers but as numbers increase it's worth giving some thought to how to make moving them easier.

Built last Summer the Hivebarrow has proved it's usefulness

I've already made a hivebarrow for moving Supers and Brood Boxes from the out apiary to the car which makes life a lot easier but once home the supers need moving to the utility room and storing before extraction and later after extraction when they're slick with honey they need removing. I've previously sat them on crownboards or hive floors which is alright but a bit of a pain when you need to move them. This year I decided I needed some sort of mobile platform the supers could live on to save me having to carry them individually to the utility room for extraction and move them individually when they're in the way. Turns out what I was thinking about is called a Dolly, although I wanted one made to measure for Supers with a solid floor and an edge to contain any spilt honey. Unfortunately nobody makes them. Large scale bee keeping operations use pallets and pallet trucks which apart from being pricey couldn't really be used a Victorian town house so I was going to have to make my own.

Nice piece of free OSB

I borrowed a huge piece of fairly thick OSB and some treated timbers from a pile of debris left by builders working on a dodgy take away nearby. Whilst it's an eyesore and I gather has already led to the owner being fined I've actually got some useful wood from the pile. I also gave a pallet in the pile a little attention with a crowbar and made a nice new deep shelf in one of my outbuildings with most of it. Measuring the board using a spare Super and the timbers I made a couple of cuts to the board to make a base for the trolley and returned the rest of it to where I'd found it. I've sized it so there's about a centimetre of spare space around each Super.

Adding sides

I used yellow wood glue to attach the sides, loads of the stuff, and clamped them in place a few days whilst the it cured. Given the weight this will potentially be carrying I decided to give it six wheels allowing me to use fairly cheap ones and also distribute the weight better so it doesn't damage the floor in my utility room. I ordered 75mm castors with rubber tyres from Amazon. Each castor and top plate is rated to carry 50KG so six gives me a total load of 300KG. I opted for a set of 4 regular wheels and two seperate ones with brakes.

Sides attached, everything still fits.

I don't know much about OSB but I doubt it's particularly good stuff for putting screws into. In case you're wondering OSB stands for Oriented Strand Board and it's basically a load of wood bits glued together, quite good for partition walls and shed floors. To hold the wheels I made six wooden pads cut from a piece of pallet wood, sourced in the same place as the rest, and glued them in place with more wood glue. I weighted them for a couple of days whilst the glue set. At one end I planned to attach a loop of rope to help move it about and again I didn't really think OSB would hold up to that very well so I glued a short plank of wood underneath that area and clamped it too. It was slow going with all the clamping and waiting. Once all the glue was dry I attached all six wheels using a belt and braces approach of Gorilla Glue and great big wood screws. Don't think they'll be dropping off any time soon. The wheels with brakes were placed at diagionally opposite corners.

I sawed the corners off at about 45 degrees to make it easier to manouvere and drilled a couple of angled holes for the rope through the board and wood below. I then used a large masonry drill bit to roughly countersink them, should be okay. Cabinet making masterclass this clearly is not.

Healthy shiny coat.

If OSB gets damp it swells and the wood strands can pull apart. It's likely honey will get spilt on this trolley at some point and cleaning honey takes a lot of water. As I didn't want the thing to fall apart after it's first use I gave it a few coats of outdoor varnish. Actually I gave it a lot of coats of outdoor varnish. A side effect of the varnish was making the trolley look a nice bright yellowy colour and less like a collection of bits hauled from a pile of rubbish.

One Super Trolley

To finish off I added a bit of nylon rope which I tied underneath the trolley with a reef knot. Once tightened with pliers I applied a little heat to the knot and the rope ends then squished it all together, don't think it's going to fray or come apart any time soon. I also added a couple of drawer handles which I shall be using to move the trolley when it's not in use and being stored vertically. The handles were attached with gorrilla glue and screws supplied with the handles and then I slung some varnish over them too. I left it outside for a few weeks for the varnish to outgas before using it -although I'm also using a couple of solid crownboards between the supers and the trolley anyway.

Super Trolley in use.

It's exactly the right size to negotiate the inside of my house, and I can move supers about effortlessly. As well as making the boxes easier to move it also makes the extracting room much easier to manage. I suspect if some bee keeping supplier decided to start making these they'ed sell rather well although with free wood it's been a cheap piece of kit to construct.

Another Roof? Super.

Been up to a little more woodwork. I have a roll of roofing felt knocking about and had some spare wood so decided to make a new roof. I have enough roofs for all the colonies I intend to manage but as my collection of Supers and Brood Boxes has grown a spare roof or two to sit on the stack when they're not in use will be handy. The wooden part of the roof is very simple to make, it's just a  box with one side open large enough to loosely fit over a Brood Box or Super with a 22mm baton stuck round the inside to ensure there's an air gap between the crownboard it'll sit on and the roof proper. I used wood glue on the mating edges, two screws on each corner of the vertical sides then 4 nails to hold the top in place before using more screws to secure it. All the screws and wood glue is probably overkill really but as roofs are used upside down to support Brood Boxes and possibly full Supers they need to be pretty robust.

Scoring the underside of the roof felt

My first attempt at using roofing felt was a bit rough and ready but I've since figured out how to do make the corners tidy by scoring the underside of the felt. Run a line along each edge where it'll fold over the edge of the roof and a diagonal short line on each corner from the inside to the outside.

Tucking in the felt

After nailing most of the way along the sides the corners can then be tucked in under a side before nailing  through the corner with a clout nail or two.

I used slightly longer nails to go into the ends of the sides, gotta be careful not to collide with a nail though.

Nearly finished

Looks nearly finished at this point but still needs a couple of vents adding. Actually if it's only ever going to sit on stacked spare kit you can probably skip these.

Lazy way to add a vent

To add those I drilled a holes into two opposing sides angled slightly upwards going through the felt, the wooden side and the baton behind it.

One fairly neat roof vent

A small rectangle of mesh, I used some spare bits of cut up mesh floor, is then slid up behind the felt. It's held in place by friction.

New roof fitting over a Super

The roof sides are meant to be 155mm tall measured on the outside but I just used some spare bits I had. You could make them longer to provide more protection for the hive especially if they're going to be someplace windy.

Yet more Supers

The season should be drawing to an end but I'm out of Supers and the colonies are still expanding over here so as well as the roof I decided to assemble a couple more Supers. I did some shopping around as I didn't ant to spend much on them. The cheapest flat packed Supers I could fine were from Peak Hives and installed 11 frames in each. The frames came from Smart Kraft and ordering fifty they came in at just under a pound each including nails and postage. A couple of parts broke during assembly but at a pound a frame I'd expect that, it's quite a saving over the larger suppliers. The foundation came from Easipet who I've ordered Supers from before, they came in at about 62p a sheet. I'd prefer to use 9 or 10 frames per Super really but if you put 9 undrawn frames in a box it's unlikely the bees will draw them out as the gaps are too big so you start with 11 and when they're drawn out change the spacing.. I used plastic metal ends to space the frames which I'll remove when the frames get moved onto 10 frame castellations next season.

Labelling up Supers

A Natinal Super will happily hold eleven frames in which bees can store extra honey which the beekeeper may harvest. However that's eleven frames with a bee space on each side. What most beekeepers do to maximise the amount of honey you can fit in a super is reduce the number of frames leaving wider combs and less space in the box lost to bee space and foundation. If you were to put 9 new frames of foundation in a box things wouldn't go very well as the bees would make wild comb in the large gaps between the frames so instead you start with eleven frames then once they're drawn out you remove one and alter the spacing and when they're drawn out again repeat the process taking you down to 9 frames. To get the spacing right you can use plastic spacers called Plastic Metal Ends ..they used to me made of metal, now they're made of plastic. You then change the size of the Plastic Metal Ends to widen the gaps. I've tried them and to be honey I find it a bit of a pain changing them so I use the other option which is metal castellations attached to the inside of each super permanently spacing the frames.

Ideally the drawn comb will wind up with 9 frame spacing but I still needed a few 10 and eleven frame Supers to help me get them drawn out that far. Some of my existing supers were already  set at ten and eleven frames and one with plastic runners. You can't tell from the outside how many frames are in a super so I decided to make things simpler for myself by spraying the outside with the numbers of frames -or an R in the case of the one with runners. I also sprayed the number of frames in my nuc boxes onto them too as they look alike too.

Stencil time

With my increased number of hives I needed extra supers and got a set of six very cheap Cedar supers from Easipet via Amazon. They were supplied without nails or glue but it still worked out a pretty decent purchase as they were so cheap. There was the odd crack here and there but nothing a bit of wood glue and clamp didn't sort out. They were supplied with some metal runners which would be fine if you use plastic spaces I suppose. They seem quite good quality so I'll be using them in brood boxes instead. I put 9 frame 
castellations into all six of the new supers.

Six new supers.

As the frames got drawn out I switched them to the new nine frame supers over time. It's not exactly rocket science but makes things a little simpler for me.

It's all about the numbers

Consolidating Honey

Having had a dry Spring and a wet Summer honey harvests across the UK are down by a huge percentage, the figure I've seen bandied about is 60%, and quite a few people in the forums are reporting no harvest at all. The season should be pretty much over by now except for any migratory beekeepers moving their bees to the moors for heather honey. However the temperature has been about 23 degrees celcius in Hull and the bees have been flying so what's actually going on is anybody's guess. There is a temptation to leave the supers (the parts of hives honey to be harvested is stored in) on the hives to let the bees carry on adding to them whilst the weather lasts but there's two reasons not to. One is after removing the honey crop the bees need time to stock up their own stores for the winter, be it from nectar or syrup they'll still need time to dehydrate it. The other reason is that ivy flowers late and we really don't want ivy honey, it crystalises in the honeycomb making it hard to remove and it smells pretty bad too.

Nine frames in a shallow Super, July 2012

In the brood box where the queen lives and lays her eggs beekeepers want as many cells as possible so the more eggs can be laid and more bees reared. In a Commercial like mine there are 11 frames giving 22 surfaces (one each side y'see) of cells to lay in. In a super we want more honey and less wax. Whilst a National Super can hold 11 frames it's more normal to use 10, 9 or even 8 frames instead. The bees then draw out the cell walls making them deeper so they store more honey in them with less space given over to vertical bee space, foundation and cappings. Unless you have frames already drawn out to the desired width it's normal to start with 11 frames per super and then remove excess frames as the middle ones get drawn out to fill the space in the box, otherwise there's too much dead air in there which the bees need to keep warm.The bees generaly draw out the frames in the middle first as the bees cluster in the centre of the brood box below and the warm air rising makes wax easier to work.

Almost fully capped frame of honey

A lot of people out there seem to think bee hives are always full of nice ready to eat honey, however that's not the case the only place I know of with ripe ready to eat honey all year round is a supermarket and if you buy the cheap stuff it's probably cut with syrup anyway but I digress... The honey needs to be ripened by the bees reducing it's water content over time, if it's not ripe then once you've extracted it the water content will be too high and it'll ferment. It's easy to tell when honey is ripe as the bees will seal the cells of ripe honey with wax. The capping over honey is white and smooth, unlike the thin brown cappings over deveoloping bees. Once a frame has 75% of it's cells capped the honey in it can be harvested. You can remove individual frames if you like but it's easier to just wait till the whole super is 75% or more capped and then remove the whole lot.

I had actually been expecting a huge honey crop this year as the mild winter meant more bees survived the winter than expected so the colonies were more populous in Spring than usual. More workforce equals more work right? Unfortunately after a winter that was a blessing the Spring and Summer were a mixed up meteorological mess and plants weren't flowering at the expected times and weren't producing enough nectar to suport our huge spring colonies, then the Summer rain meant bees couldn't go out foraging anyway. After starting the season smiling beekeepers were suddenly having to emergency feed their colonies to stop them starving ..and I gather quite a few did starve, it was a significant enough problem to prompt  reporting in the mainstream media as well as prompting DEFRA to issue starvation warnings. I also managed to lose a prime swarm from Hive2 which was unfortunate and temporarily reduced their workforce. Going by what I'm seeing reported in other parts of the country Hull seems to have done better over the summer weatherwise than other parts of the UK and I was able to to put two supers on both hives. There were a couple of false starts when I had to remove the supers and feed the bees again but eventually the season started moving forwards.

Hive1 has been happily filling up 2 supers both of which I'm planning to remove very soon, probably this weekend. Hive2 however managed to nearly fill one super but the other is only about 20% full and I really don't see the bees being able to comlete it in time for harvesting before winter preparations or the arrival of ivy nectar. So I hatched a simple plan to consolidate the honey from the nearly empty super with that of the almost full one -or into the brood box if the other super gets fully capped. At the top of the hive under the roof is another lid, the crownboard. The crownboard has a few holes in it for feeding and a few other things. When not being fed it's common to close the holes up, to the bees if you leave the feeding holes open just enough for them to get through they will consider anything above the crownboard to be outside the hive, and any honey outside the hive is fair game as far as they're conerned. So I moved the nearly empty super above the crownboard and hopefully as I'm typing this the bees of Hive2 are busily robbing the honey it contained and storing it in the Super I'll be harvesting, failing that they should be storing it in the brood box for themselves to use over Winter.

Hive2 with a crownboard between the two supers

The bees propensity (good word that, think I'll try to use it more) for stealing honey from anything above the crownboard is actually quite useful for beekeepers. After extracting honey with a spinner the beekeeper is left with frames of honey comb which have honey residue still stuck to the wax, these can be stored 'wet' but there's always the change the honey will attract pests so many prefer to store them 'dry' with this removed. The simplest way to dry your wet frames is to pop them back into your hives above the crownboard and let the bees removed every last drop for you.