Leaving Supers On Over Winter – Should You Keep Supers On Your Beehive?

In this video, I'm going to tell you why we never ever leave a super on our colonies over winter. So this is probably one of the widest things that I see in beekeeping, and it's not to say that it's the wrong thing to do. In this video, I'm going to tell you why I personally don't do it. So the general consensus I feel from speaking to other people is that it's best for the bees to leave them a super of their own honey to overwinter on, as opposed to taking that honey and feeding them sugar syrup. So my personal view on that is that it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. Feeding bees refined sugar syrup It's essentially exactly the same for them. It's just sugar. It's the same stuff that they find in nectar. It's just a very refined version of it. It's proven to not have any issues with giving the bees dysentery, whereas some nectars can actually give the bees dysentery over winter anyway. And then the final benefit in terms of the actual sugar is that you're giving the bees a boost of incoming food at the end of the season, which I find gives them a boost, builds that brood nest up nice and strong, Which gives them a really good chance of overwintering well. So in terms of what the bees need, you're taking away one form of sugar and you're giving them an equally identical form of sugar in exactly the same quantity. No issues whatsoever. My personal view though is you get a lot of other additional benefits from not leaving your bees a super of honey. So you need to kind of dig into the mechanics of beekeeping a little bit to understand this though. So if you're using a queen excluder, you've got your brood box. Brood frames get dark very, very quickly due to the casings that the bees put around the larva and the pupa. And you can see this in that you need to replace the brood frames, say, every 3 years. When it comes to extracting honey, it's so much easier to extract honey out of the super frames than it is to extract honey out of frames that have previously contained brood. So even in its simplest form, it means that you're preserving all of your supers, all of your national shallows, if you're keeping those above a queen excluder, exclusively for honey storage only. Which for the beekeeper makes life very, very easy indeed. So there's one benefit, you're keeping your brood frames for brood and you're keeping your super frames as supers. I know there's a little bit of an argument there in terms of what you do with a demarée, but we've started moving now more towards keeping the demarée boxes exclusively for brood and trying to roll them around a little bit and make sure that you don't end up with any honey in your brood boxes come the end of the year. Going off on a little bit of a tangent with that one, but I do find it's good to keep your super frames for honey And your brood frames for brood. The next benefit is in the overall size of the cluster and the box in which you're keeping your bees in. So I really do find massive benefits for condensing down big strong colonies into a single box and trying to overwinter them in that fashion. A National deep box can keep around 40 pounds of stores when you pack them out for winter. That should be more than enough to see through even the biggest colonies of bees. So you don't actually need to have that additional super of honey above. And I often see in the spring people who have kept a super above the colony, they still got quite a lot of that super left over. And especially if you're in an area where you're going to be getting late ivy honey, that could prove to be a real issue and something that you need to take off, try and get that ivy honey out, and it gives you a really bad start to the season trying to deal with set frames. But even just in terms of the general mechanics of that box and the space in which it fills, in order for the bees to keep that whole void a certain temperature, the bigger the box, the more energy they need. So as you make that void bigger, the more energy they need to keep it as a consistent temperature. So you might think, well, I left the super on and they used all of the super. That means I should leave a super on. But it might well be the case that you left the super on, created an additional volume of space in there, and then the bees needed the extra energy in order to keep that additional volume of space warm. The next one is in terms of where you keep that super. So you see people mentioning the word nadir. And what nadir means is you're taking a box and putting it underneath the brood box. So I see people doing this late in the season, taking a fully capped super of honey and putting it underneath the brood box. And I kind of look at it and just think, that's really not what you should be doing. You're setting the colony completely wrong there, and you're giving the bees a really hard job for late in the season, 'cause you're putting all of that capped honey underneath the brood area. It's not where the bees want it, because it makes it really, really easy for wasps to get in and steal that honey. Without going through the congested brood nest. So I think a nadir has got its place in beekeeping, but I would exclusively use it for the supers where they definitely haven't capped anything over. You've got maybe 50 or 60% nectar in there, maybe the nectar's shaking out a little bit. A nadir for me works really, really well just slipping that super off, putting it underneath the brood box, leaving it there for a couple of weeks maximum, and then whipping it out at the end of the year, putting it back into your superstore, and overwintering the bees on a single brood box. However, if you're not going to adhere your bees and you're going to go through the winter, taking out the queen excluder is a very important step here. If you're leaving your supers on, make sure you take the queen excluder out. If you don't, that is a surefire way to end up with a dead colony come the spring because the bees have moved naturally up. Queen can't get through the queen excluder, she remains downstairs, she gets cold, she dies, and all of your bees are upstairs in the super. If you've taken the queen excluder out and you've got your bees set up on a national deep And then a national shallow on top of it going into the winter, almost certainly what you're going to find in the spring is the majority of your bees are going to be upstairs in the super and they're going to have reared brood upstairs in the super. That's a real pain because for me, that wrecks all of your shallow frames, means that the bees have reared brood in them, means that they're much more liable for wax moth damage, means that they're way more difficult to extract, to get those cappings off with a knife. It also means that you need to add an additional manipulation in early in the Bring in order to get everything back right again. So you either need to wait for the colony to build up to full strength, put the queen excluder back in, make sure that the queen is underneath the queen excluder, or you need to flip the boxes round. And if you flip the boxes round, I've done this previously, you find that they're just really happy downstairs rearing brood in that national shallow. And then you need to go and do another manipulation to get that national shallow back up to the top again. Adds in quite a lot of faff for the beekeeper. And the big thing for me is that it really doesn't give the bees any benefit. So if this was something where I said, well, you know what, the bees get a lot of benefit, but there's some disbenefits to the beekeeper. Could probably get behind that, and I'd probably be looking at that and saying, I want the very best for my bees. But my personal experience is that the bees really do well condensing them down really small over winter in box, take away their food, feed them, which stimulates them to rear brood, create a big strong broodness going into winter. National decrease around 40 pounds of stores, more than enough to get a colony through winter. If you're on 14 by 12, you definitely, definitely don't need to give them a super, because if anything, 14 by 12 ends up with stores left over even if you don't have a super on it. And then the final biggest issue is it massively limits you in terms of mite treatments. So if you're like me, you're using Apivar. As soon as you put Apivar strips into a colony that's got that super on, firstly, you're going against the guidance. It says that all supers should be taken off. But secondly, you've tainted the wax within that super, which means that it can never be used for honey extraction again. It essentially becomes another brood box. And then it means you're in this situation where you've got different size brood boxes. You've got a National deep and you've got a National shallow, but they're both brood boxes. Makes your life really, really difficult, and it doesn't give any benefit to the bees. So I'm interested to see what people think about this. Do you leave a super on over winter? If you do, does it go top or bottom, or do you take all the supers off and backfill with sugar syrup? Which one works best for you? Leave it in the comments, I'd love to know.