How To Nadir A Super - Reverse Boxes And Use Part Filled Honey Supers
In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey explains the technique called “nadir” – moving a honey super from above the brood box to underneath it. He defines the term, discusses why and when it is useful (primarily to encourage bees to clean out partially‑filled supers late in the season so the frames can be removed before winter), and demonstrates the full procedure step‑by‑step. Edwards shows the manipulation on real colonies, explains the natural upward flow of nectar and honey, and highlights key timing (late August to early September). He warns against using the method on heavy, honey‑filled supers, cautions about varroa treatments contaminating supers, and stresses checking for the queen before removal. The video also includes a brief sponsorship acknowledgment. The overall message is that nadiring is a simple, situational tool for managing partially‑filled supers, not a routine practice for every hive.
Chapters
Today I'm going to show you how to nadir a super. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. In this video, I'm going to show you how to nadir a super, and if you're not sure what that means, I'm going to show you it in this video. Nadir though is spelled N-A-D-I-R, and all it means, the simplest thing in the world, this is No Nonsense Beekeeping, It means taking the super from above the brood box and putting it underneath the brood box. Takes you 10 seconds. What I'm going to talk about though in this video is how you do that, when you do that, and why you do that. So I'll get my bee suit on in a minute. I'll go and show you how I do it to a colony because it is so simple. But first, a couple of questions. So why would you do a nadir? Why would you do this manipulation? And I think nadiring supers has become very, very popular for some reason. Not entirely sure why. And people do it just kind of religiously. So they say, well, I'm going to be on brood and a half, I need to nadir my super, I need to put it underneath the brood box going into winter. And they take like a full super of honey and they take it from the top and they put it underneath in the end of August, beginning of September. And I just think, what are you doing? Why are you actually doing that? What is the point? The bees have put the honey above them for a reason, and now you're putting that honey and you're putting it underneath them. So I don't quite understand that. If anybody does that and you want to let me know why you do that, Please feel free to let me know in the comments. I'm a little bit baffled. For me, the only reason I nadir supers, and I'll talk to you about it a little bit because I'm going to show you in an example over here, is when I'm going through my supers for honey extraction, I might have 4 or 5 supers on a hive if I'm lucky, maybe 1 or 2 if I'm not so lucky. But what I always end up with is a few frames or 1 super that's just nectar. There's just some nectar in it. And nothing's capped. I might have, say, like 4 frames of foundation, 2 or 3 frames like 20 or 30% capped, and then loads of frames of nectar as well. Now for me, I want to get on and I want to get that honey off and I want to get it back into the brood box, but bees don't move nectar down. They don't move nectar or honey downwards, they only move it upwards. So if you ever go into your hives when they want to flow and you go into the brood box And you're just saturated with nectar. That's what the bees do. They go out like the bees here are doing, just magnificent. I'm going to sit here and watch these bees in a little bit because they are going for it today, back end of September on a Himalayan balsam flow. But they go out, they go and collect nectar, they bring it back into the brood box, they pass it to the nearest bee, they store it in the brood box, and then at nighttime they start fanning that down, they start moving it up into the supers, and then the next day the brood box is clear again. That impulse to move nectar and honey upwards is what a nadir is kind of manipulating, I guess. So the only reason that I will ever nadir a super is if I've got a really partially used super, little bit of nectar in it, and I'm thinking, well, if I go and put that into storage over winter, it's going to ferment and then I'm going to end up with some manky frames. So for me, the only reason that I nadir supers is just to get the bees to clean them out. So I'll have 4 or 5 supers, like I said, if I'm lucky on a hive. I'll take off the 4 that are capped, maybe move some frames around as well, and then I'll get left with one super that's not got much in it. Might have a few frames of foundation, a few frames of partially capped honey, and then a few frames of nectar as well. I'll take that box, I'll put it underneath the brood box, and then at that point you can put your feeders on as well. I'll give them a week or so And then 9 times out of 10, if you do it at the right time of the year, and I would suggest doing this kind of back end of August, early September. I know I'm doing this video a little bit late. They'll bring all of that nectar up. You can go back into the colony and the box will be empty, and then you can just take it away. And that is always what I would recommend. I wouldn't suggest just leaving it on over winter, especially if you're doing any varroa treatments. You don't want to taint your supers with any sort of Amitraz from Apivar. And that is my process. So I'm going to get my bee suit on. I'll go and show you one colony that I've left a brood box on. So it's on double brood at the moment, and I'm just going to show you how I would nadir that super by putting it underneath. And you'll watch all of the bees take all of that honey and nectar and move it upwards. And that's how I'm going to condense them down into a single brood box for winter. Right. So this is the hive that I'm going to show you how to nadir a super. And they are in effect on double brood here. So it's slightly different. But let's just assume the bottom box is a brood box with just brood in it, and the top box here, this top national deep, that is just a honey super. It is the simplest manipulation in the world, and we've spoken about why you do it. I'm going to show you now how you do it. So simple though. Now, if you hadn't noticed already, these 3 hives are sponsored by Kimberly-Clark Flint Mill. Thanks guys for the sponsorship. I think I'll get this right. You've got Andrex, Kleenex, And Huggies. So 3 different brands, 3 sponsored hives, much appreciated. Let's get inside and have a look how we're going to nadir this super now. So this is what I'm talking about. You get frames like this, and this is just the end of the season. This box should have come off a while ago, but I left it on, and they've put a little bit more in it than I expected them to because I wanted to show you how to nadir. But this is what you're talking about. So if you look inside there, got loads of empty frames. And then on here we've got some nectar in there as well, and we've got like, what, 5 or 10% of capped honey in there. I'm not going to go to the extent of extracting frames like that because it just takes me too much time. So if you've got a box, maybe even that's not even as capped as this, that is what you're looking for when you come to do your Nadeers. We're going to take this box, all of the frames that are included in it, and we're just going to reverse it and we're going to put it underneath the brood box. And what they're going to do is they're going to take up all of the nectar that's in here, they'll break open that honey as well, they'll move everything upstairs into the brood box, and then within a couple of weeks I can come back and I can just remove that bottom box and then I can overwinter them on a single brood box. So in terms of a breakdown for this box here, I've got a couple of frames like that, a little bit of nectar in them, a little bit of capped honey in them. I've got about 6 or 7 frames of foundation, A couple of drawn combs as well, but there's no weight to the box whatsoever. I'll just reemphasize, do not do this if you've got like a decent amount of honey in the box. Just extract whatever you can and then you can put the remainder on the nadir if you need to. You can also mix frames around from different colonies if that's something you need to do just to get them to work it. The only reason I use a nadir is to clean up frames that I don't want to extract. And I'll use the nectar and I'll use the honey in there to help the bees overwinter on those stores. So all I'm going to do, I'm going to take the top box, put it off to one side, take the bottom box, put that off to one side, and just flip them over. Remember, if you're doing this in a classic circumstance, I'm doing this last week of September, so I'm doing it a little bit late. We're going to assume that there's your brood box and then you've got a queen excluder in between the two. And then this is like the worst super that you've got, your last super with nothing in it. We'll remove the excluder completely. You don't need the excluder. And we're gonna set it up with the nadir super underneath and then the brood box on top. So once you've got them separated, the bees are really, really happy with me today. This is what you get for trying to mess around with bees late on in the season. The brood box over there, the super over there, and I'm just going to flip them around now. It's as simple as that. The bees, they're not happy with me. Angry, angry bees at this time of year. But what we've done is we've nadired that super, and it was a super, it just didn't have a queen excluder underneath it. My super's now on the bottom, my brood box is now on the top. They're going to take all of the honey, anything usable, any nectar Any honey, they're going to take it from this bottom box, they're going to bring it up to this top box here, and then within a couple of weeks, probably quicker than that, and come away, and I can remove this bottom box, take it away completely, and I'll leave myself with a single box to overwinter. Now you can overwinter in this configuration now if you really want to. You're not doing any varroa treatments that are going to compromise the integrity of your super foundation or your super drawn comb. Then you could just leave them like this to overwinter if that's what you want to do. But I will re-emphasize it for the third time, don't do this. If there's loads of honey in the bottom box and the brood's in the box below, all you need to do is just whip out the queen excluder and just leave it as it is. And then you'll do a reversal next year in order to get you back onto brood and a half in the correct format. Right, so we're quite clearly at a different apiary now. I just wanted to show you the second part of how to nadir a super. And this colony here, I did this a couple of weeks ago. I took all of the honey off from this apiary, and what we've got here is a brood box here, and then at the bottom I've got my nadir super. And I put that super down there because it wasn't worth extracting, but I didn't want to leave it out. I didn't want to leave it to ferment in storage. I didn't want the bees to rob it, so I put it at the bottom of that brood box for the bees to work it up into the brood box. And I'm gonna show you the second step of it now. So hopefully what we're gonna see, bees don't always play by the books though. Hopefully what we're gonna see is the brood box is full, full of brood, full of honey, full of stores, and the bottom nadir super is completely empty. Let's get in, see if that's the case. If it's empty, we can just remove it and then the bees are ready for winter. Let's get inside, see if it's gone to plan. So over on the left-hand side, I've got my feeder there. I've got my 14x12 brood box, and then this is my Nadeered super. And when I opened it up, I thought, oh God, there's going to be loads of honey in there, there's going to be loads of brood. They're just using the space to cluster up, and all of these frames are completely empty. Pull out a few now, show you that they're completely empty. Just be wary, the queen could be in there. That's the thing that could go wrong with this manipulation, is you, you lose the queen. So just be careful, make sure the queen's not Down there. I'll show you some of these frames and I'll show you how well they've cleared them out. So there we go, you can see— you'll have to believe me— these did have nectar in, had a little bit of stores in, and now they have cleaned them out. They do not like honey underneath them, and their natural instinct is to move that up. That's what they've done here. So I can safely now clear out this super, shake all of the bees back up into that brood nest. And then I successfully nadir the super, and I can take it away now. So there we go, as simple as that. Again, this is a video I've been meaning to do for a long, long time, and I've had loads of questions about it. I just wanted to clear up any myths that are out there, and I wanted to give you my take on when I think it is suitable to nadir a super. And it's definitely not something that I would do just as a matter of fact for every single colony every year. I hope you enjoyed that video. I hope you found it useful. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time. See you next time.
