The Biggest Mistake When Adding Your First Super

2 weeks ago, I installed a 6-frame nucleus into this beehive. We're back today to add some supers. So whenever you set up a nucleus colony in a beehive, it's best to get the feeder on, or if you're lucky, you've got nice early spring weather and nectar and pollen coming in. Yeah, just had a couple of buzzes there, so it's quite easy. That's a warning sign for me. Bees are not happy with that. I'll give them a little smoke and I'm gonna get my veil up. So you'll see me all the time in front of beehives, my veil down, and if the bees are chilled out, I'm happy to do that. But I took a little sting to the chin there and a couple of them buzzed me, and it's a quite clear warning sign to say we're not really up for you doing that today. So, but the purpose of today's video is to go in, make sure the bees have got enough space. We'll do a quick inspection, see if we can see the queen, see if we can see some eggs and brood. I'll talk about the space constraints inside this box here, and then we'll look at seeing whether we can add a super on, giving the bees more space to gather some honey during the season. So let's get inside and see how the bees have grown. So no feeder on this colony here because they were very well fed, and there we go, you can see they have completely filled the box already. Now this is a little bit of a concern. I was going to tell you about the 80% rule, which is if you've got a box like this with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 frames, once you're on maybe 8 or 9, somewhere in the middle of that, the 80% rule applies, which is If the box is 80% full of bees, it needs another box above it. Now do be careful with that rule. It only applies during the active beekeeping season from say the middle of April through to the middle of August in the UK, possibly longer than that depending if you're getting some nice late season heather honey. It doesn't apply at any point throughout the spring when the bees are building up, and it really is probably one of the most challenging things that beginner beekeepers have to do, which is look at a colony like this and say, Are the bees ready for a super? And my argument would be, well, it's good to look at the bees. Definitely good to get a look and see how big the bees are. Are they there or thereabouts with the 80% rule? But I would say the bigger clues come from kind of looking up and looking around and seeing the lengthening days and looking at the dates and looking at the temperature and looking at the entrances and seeing if there's bees coming back with nectar and pollen. And then actually interrogating what's going on inside the box here, pulling out the frames, seeing how many frames of brood you've got, how many frames of stores you've got, and just trying to get the little clues that show you that the bees are ready for more space. If you just come right in here, Zane, I can show you one of the clues that I always love, which is this upward wax on the frames here. As soon as they start building nice light wax upwards like that, anywhere across any of the frames really, it shows that they're struggling for space and it's a great indication for getting that super on. Whilst you're up there, Zane, you can see that that box there is completely full. Now my recommendation to you would be, even if this frame here and this frame here were still just foundation, But you were seeing some of the signs that we're seeing here with wax coming up and you were looking around and it's good weather and you know it's roughly the time of year to be adding a super, then you can go ahead and you can add your first super on. But before we do that, let's take a quick look inside this brood box here to see how that queen's getting on, see if she's got enough space. But looking at this already, I know we're going to be adding some super boxes above this one because it is bursting at the seams. So pulling out the last frame there because it was the easiest one to get out. And it's funny, isn't it? Because that bee came down and stung me, and they seemed like they were a little bit aggressive, and I put my veil up, but they're, they're pretty chill. They're not too bad. Now, it's always frustrating when stuff like this happens. I just said to Zane to stop filming there because I wanted to check something. I don't think we've got a queen in here, and I'll go back to where I can see that from the first frame. So I'll show you exactly what I saw first time round, and I'm pretty sure the queen has died. inside this hive. So those little structures there, they are emergency cells that the bees are in the process of taking down. But see how they're all frilly at the bottom? Yeah, see how if I was to connect that there, you could see almost like a circle at the bottom? Mhm. That means virgins have emerged out of here. And these kind of cells here, these emergency cells, you only get when there's a rapid emergency response, which is a queen is killed instantly, likely due to squishing her between the frames, which is really frustrating. Don't often do that. Could have been something else though. These nucs here have been transported up here, but I'm almost certain that we're not going to find a queen in here, which is really frustrating. But it means there will be a virgin hiding somewhere in here. Let's see if we can find her. Although I've come here today to try and teach you when to put a super on, I'm going to hopefully teach you something else, which is how to see and spot the signs that you might have killed your queen, which is arguably a little bit more Zane, there's hope. Okay. There is hope. This is turning into a cool video, isn't it? Right, look at that. So we had emergency cells, but we've also got eggs. Okay, that's made me feel a lot better seeing eggs. And the reason that I jumped from that first frame looking at emergency cells to the middle is that I know generally that's where the bees are going to be, that's where the queen's going to be laying all of her eggs. So I just wanted to do that check, and when I checked in the middle, I saw Emerging brood. I didn't see any eggs, so I'm thinking, right, the queen's definitely gone. We've got eggs in here now, which paints a very, very different picture. I think we're going to find a queen, and I think we're going to find lots and lots of capped brood like that. Wow, I should have just pulled that frame out first, Zane, and all would have been good. Look at that. So I can tell you something really cool about this frame here as well, which is the bees have definitely gone out and found the dandelion because the color of all of this wax. See how it's tinted and really golden and orange? And it only goes that color when the bees go out and find the dandelion, which is in really fine bloom this season. So all is good, emergency over. We have got capped brood, we've got brood in all stages, we've got eggs. There is no doubt that I'm going to go ahead and find the queen now. So what I'll quickly do here, Zane, is I'm just going to go through the rest of the 7 or 8 frames. I'll pull them out really quickly, I'll give you a quick overview of what's inside, and then we will get a super on. Okay, so queen. On a frame of capped brood, emergency definitely over. Next frame along, mostly capped brood, good amount of drone brood in there as well, which is a sign they're a few weeks away from swarming at a maximum. Look at that one there, tons and tons of capped brood in there again. Another frame, mostly capped brood full of eggs. Another frame. of capped brood. That is a brand new frame and it's mostly drawn out, but look at it on that side, loads of brood as well. And even over here, the bees are drawing that out and that is fully laid up. I'll shake this one off, Zane, if you come in close and take a look at this. Yeah, so you can see brood in all stages there. Bees are covering pretty much every frame, and I have counted 8 frames of brood. So I counted 8 frames of brood there, and I know that each one of those frames there is gonna end up being at least 2 frames of bees in about 3 weeks' time. So 8 frames of brood is gonna be 16 frames of bees in addition to what is already here. And as you can see, they've got nowhere near enough space. So using any rule that you want, this colony here needs some supers on. Let's go ahead and do that now. So before I put a super on, we need to put this queen excluder on. And you can see if I just go ahead and put that on, It's a little bit misshapen, but you've got all this wax in the way. We need to clean this wax up before we put the queen excluder on. Now, really simple to do that, just give the bees a little bit of a smoke, should get them going down, and then you can just come along with your hive tool and clear up any wax. Now, don't throw this wax away. Not only is it a disease risk, but it's really good for rendering down and using at the end of the year. So just put it in a little bucket and I'll show you how to render that down at the end of the season. So once you've got it all nice and clean like that, you can just take your queen excluder and don't worry if it's all over the place like this one, the supers will hold everything in place. So then it's as simple as this, you take your super and you just place it on top like that. Now I've just done a separate video talking about the different spacing within the super. If you want to check that out, it'll be in the top right-hand corner. But what I'm using here is I'm using self-spacing SN4 frames and I'm using foundation. I'm also just going to go straight ahead and add the second super on already. Now this configuration here isn't ideal if you're doing it early on in the season. Don't come in the UK in the back end of March, early April and think this is a good configuration. You can only go ahead and do this once you get into the nice warm stable period where it's 7 or 8 degrees overnight and then peaking up 19, 20, 21 degrees Celsius, probably somewhere mid-80s in Fahrenheit up in the day. If you do it when it's still dipping back down really cold overnight, all of the heat downstairs in the brood box is going to be lost upwards. Also, do not do this if there's any risk of there not being enough stores downstairs. We went through, we looked at all of those frames, we've got tons of capped stores, there's lots of nectar coming in. But once you put the supers on like this, you are effectively making this call: I don't need to feed these bees again until at least June. That is what you're saying. So when you're inspecting the brood box, bear that in mind. Do the bees have enough stores to get them through until June? Obviously not. So you need to look up, look at the weather, see what's happening. Look at that short-term forecast, look at the longer-term forecast, and you will kind of get to the point where you just realize when is the right time to go in the UK. For me, I'm doing this, it's like 20th, 21st of April, which I would say is pretty much around average for us. For most people in the UK, it's gonna be a little bit earlier than that towards the beginning, maybe the middle of April, depending on where you are in the country. So that's it. This colony here is fully set back up. I'm assuming I'm not gonna have to feed this one. I'm gonna get this roof back into position. And I will leave the bees to it. I'll continue to do my weekly inspections on this colony here, and maybe later on in the season we'll come back and see if the bees got any honey. If you're interested in learning how to assess your colonies like that, to be able to read them and get the best out of them time and time again, check out our course 14-Day Beekeeper that will turn you from a beginner to a competent beekeeper in just 14 days.