In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards explains why the timing of adding supers to a hive is critical. He contrasts the problems of placing supers too early—causing the colony to lose heat and potentially requiring supplemental feeding—with the dangers of adding them too late, which can trigger swarming and cause the bees to backfill the brood nest with nectar. Edwards pulls frames from a hive to illustrate these issues, showing excessive drone brood, crowded worker brood, and capped stores that leave no space for the bees. He describes how a lack of space forces bees to store nectar in the brood area, a sign of an unhealthy May hive. The video concludes with a clear remedial action: pause, install a queen excluder, and immediately add supers so bees can lift the nectar into the supers, creating space and reducing swarming risk.
Chapters
If you're seeing this in your brood box, you've left it too late to put your supers on, just like I have done in this hive here. So putting your supers on early in the season is always a little bit of a gamble. Put them on too early, you can knock the colony back because they struggle to keep the space warm. Put them on too late, this happens— they try and swarm and they backfill the brood nest with nectar. I'm going to pull out a couple of frames here to show you what it looks like if you've left it too late. I'd like to say I err on the side of caution and just think I put them on early, but I've done it before where I've done that. I've gone in, put them on early, and then the weather has turned and it's just been so miserable that I've had to feed, which means that I've had to go out and take the supers back off again. And I did it once and I swore down I'm never ever doing it again. It is the most difficult thing to do in the spring, blowing out empty supers to make sure that you can get back on and feed. So that was one extreme. Now I'm gonna show you the other extreme. So this frame here is the perfect example of what happens if you leave it too late to put your supers on. What you can see here in that corner, you've got loads of drone brood. All around the top ring there, you've got lots of nice worker brood. And if this colony here had supers on, what you would see in the center there would be eggs. Guaranteed you would be seeing eggs there because that's what bees do. That's what queens do. They start in the center, they work out to the edge, and then once it's all emerged in the center, they go back in and they lay eggs there again. This colony is running out of space, and therefore instead of putting eggs back there, they've gone in and that's where they're storing the nectar. So here's another frame in this colony kind of showing the reverse of that. You've got your brood in the center there, but then look, you've got lots of capped stores all the way around the edge and pollen jam-packed. Not a single cell available for the bees to do anything in. That's not a healthy place to be in May. The bees need space. And you need to make sure they've got space both in the brood nest and also upstairs in the supers. This colony here has got neither and it needs immediate action. So there we go. If you're seeing that in your colonies, like I said, pause the video, get outside, get the queen excluder on and super up immediately. If you catch this in time, it's an easy fix for the bees. All they'll do is they'll lift all of that nectar up into the supers, creating much more space in the brood nest, which hopefully, fingers crossed, should stop them swarming.
