Supering to Prevent Swarming

Even though we’re just entering spring, it’s time to plan for supering. In our area of Greenwich, NY, swarm season and supering both start around May 1. The reason they are both about the same date is that both relate to large quantities of nectar being brought into the hives.

There are some variations to consider when adding supers: Do you have foundation in your supers, or do you have comb? Do you have a queen excluder that will prevent the queen from entering super(s) and laying eggs up there? What if you have some foundation, and some comb? What about feeding?

Adding a super with frames of drawn comb to your hive

Adding a super of comb gives your bees instant room to deposit nectar outside of the brood nest. If they don’t have a super or two, all that nectar crowds the cells in the brood nest and the queen doesn’t find any empty cells to lay eggs in. This is considered one of the main causes of swarming. I remember when I started keeping bees, I never added a super until after Father's Day. And I always had swarms. Even if you add supers on time, you may still have swarms, since it is the colony’s instinct to swarm and make more colonies.

A queen excluder keeps brood production below, and honey production above. Sometimes bees seem reluctant to cross through a queen excluder. A good way to lure bees up through a queen excluder is to put one frame of brood in the center of the super. Nurse bees can’t stay away from brood! This takes a little planning if your supers and brood boxes are different sizes (medium and deep). 

Here’s how to do it: Insert one medium frame in the middle of a deep brood box and check it in a week. If it has eggs and brood, shake bees off into their brood chamber and put that medium frame with brood in the center of the super. It will lure bees to come above the queen excluder. This brood will emerge before you harvest, so don’t worry about brood being in your super. It’s temporary. If the medium frame has free-hanging comb beneath the bottom bar, trim it off.

It’s great to have comb from years past. The wax in combs that never have been used to raise brood stays pale yellow and can be used for decades. If no beeswax comb is ready for your supers, BetterComb is a great substitute. It is molded synthetic wax with full depth cells. We like to use 9 equally spaced frames of comb in a 10 frame super because then the bees extend the cells and make each comb a bit fatter, and it’s better for uncapping during harvest. But don’t try this until you have comb, since an improper number of foundation frames in a box causes crazy comb to be built. Bees only deepen honey cells like this - never worker brood cells - because worker brood is always a certain length.

How to super up a hive with frames of foundation

What if you don’t have any comb, but only foundation? Bees want to expand their brood area during these few months of fast growth. Their urge is to increase population and nest size. Foundation isn’t actually room to lay eggs or deposit nectar, though. They have to create comb on the foundation for it to be usable space. Help them by putting one box of foundation right above the brood boxes, without a queen excluder for a while. This placement, along with no excluder, gives them every advantage in making comb. 

It also helps if you feed sugar syrup (half sugar, half water). You may wonder: will this syrup become honey for me later? The answer is NO. But the syrup mainly gets used in the bees’ bodies, changing carbohydrates to lipids in the form of beeswax from their wax glands. It’s not proper to feed while supers of comb are on a hive though, because bees will store syrup in the supers. Remember, sugar syrup never becomes honey.

Supering up a hive with a mix of frames with foundation and comb

If you have some foundation and some comb, you can use them together. Remember, bees make comb on foundation best when it is centered, and right above the brood. Use a full 10 frames, comb around foundation, in a 10 frame box. When comb is created, you can remove one frame and space the 9 out equally to achieve fatter honeycombs.

How to add even more honey supers to your hive

You may wonder if subsequent supers should stack on top, or be inserted below one that was already there. Though it’s harder to “bottom super,” it’s a better method with a foundation-filled super. Consider the fact that foundation gets drawn best within the brood nest, and the next best results are immediately above the warmth of the brood. If a new super is placed up above a full super, it may get drawn in the frenzy of spring expansion, but it could just sit ignored up there. Sometimes bees treat a full super as The Top of Their Colony and don’t do any work above the full super. If a super is too heavy to move, remove a few frames until the super is lighter and can be removed from the hive. Temporarily put the frames in another box and return them to their usual super as you are closing the hive.

Some books say to move frames from outer positions to more central positions. This is fine, but not absolutely necessary. Rearranging foundation frames is done to get comb made on them faster. It's fine to leave them as-is and check back in 2-3 weeks. Another thing some folks do when placing a new super is to group all finished (capped or at least very full) combs in an upper super, putting less finished ones in a lower super where they will get the most attention from the bees.

Water-filled nectar takes up a lot more space than thickened honey, so don’t be surprised later to find fewer combs full of capped honey than you counted full of nectar. Bees sip nectar in combs over and over and redeposit it as part of the curing process. As the honey cures, it loses water and volume. This will compact many frames of nectar down to fewer frames of honey. 

The importance of using a queen excluder when adding a honey super

If you don’t use a queen excluder between the brood chamber and the supers, there may be brood in the supers later. As you pick frames to extract, leave the ones with brood in the hive. Remember: a box should not be left with empty spaces, so put frames in if you remove less than a full super. Even with a queen excluder I occasionally find brood “upstairs.” Perhaps the queen excluder was faulty, or maybe a swarm occurred and then the new queen reentered the hive through the upper entrance. 

The process of “supering up” may go on from just before swarm season begins, to 6 weeks or so before all blooms are gone (hard frost for us up in NY). You can add supers of comb one by one by one (some hives may have 4 or 5 supers). Or you can just slap on 4 supers of comb all at once. This method has a bit of risk, because if the space inside a hive is way more than what the bees can patrol, small hive beetles and/or wax moths may thrive in the unpatrolled areas. But if you are going away on a trip, how about a happy medium: add 2-3 supers of comb to a strong populous colony.