Bees move into supers only when the brood box gets crowded and new workers emerge to fill the space. Add supers before congestion happens, use fresh beeswax foundation, and wait a week or two. Tricks and sprays don't work.
In this video, I'm going to show you how to tempt your bees up into the supers. So this is one of the questions that I get asked all the time. How do I get my bees up from the brood box into the supers? People think there's some magic behind it, there's some certain stuff you can spray on the frames or something that you can use to lure them up. But in this video, I'm just going to give you the honest truth and tell you exactly how you really get your bees upstairs into the supers. So I was here 7 days ago. I had a brood box full of bees and I made the decision to go ahead and add my supers on. I didn't add on just one super, I added on 2 supers straight away, and I'm back here 7 days later to see if I've managed to tempt my bees upstairs. So this is the problem that beekeepers have. They have their colony, their nucleus downstairs, and it's expanding in the brood nest here. You then have your queen excluder and you put these shallow boxes on top. They're the supers, that's where you want to store the honey, and the idea is to get the bees in this box up into the supers so they can start working it, they can start drawing it out, and it gives the bees the space to go out, get nectar, bring it back, and store it as honey. Now what often happens is beekeepers put the supers on maybe a little bit too early, and then they worry why the bees are not moving from the bottom box up. They think they've done something wrong, they think they've set something up wrong, they think they've maybe used the wrong type of foundation, or they've not put enough wax on their plastic foundation, and then they start panicking and they start wanting to do something to try and lure the bees up from here into this box. But this is where people get the mindset wrong when it comes to tempting bees upstairs. You're not tempting anyone. The bees will go where the bees want to go, and if the bees are rearing brood, they're going to rear it downstairs as close as possible to where the queen is. And this is where it becomes really easy to understand. There is no way of tempting the bees up. These boxes up here, the bees will use them when they are ready. This is space for the beehive to expand. This is space for the brood nest to fill this area and all of this area up here to become honey production facilities. But in order for the bees to do that and to go up there and to draw all of that out, you need sufficient bees. So it's not a case of tempting the bees downstairs from the brood nest up, because then who tends to the brood nest? And it's only when that central portion of brood emerges and those 6 to 8 frames of brood turn into 12 to 16 frames of bees, you immediately, and it almost feels like overnight, have a box that's full of bees down here and this area is empty. And then you come back and all of a sudden there's loads and loads of bees up there. So enough talking, let's get inside, see if I managed to get the bees up in my supers. So last week I added 2 supers on because I knew the brood nest was really congested and I knew that once that brood emerged, there was gonna be a lot of bees. And this is pretty much what I expected to happen, which is, nope, the bees have not come up to the top box yet. Got the odd bee running around, but that is essentially empty. But come and have a close-up look in here, Zane, because we have got a lot of bees working in this box now. So my veil's falling down a little bit, so I'm just going to take that off. But what do you think, Zane? Do you think we've managed to tempt the bees into the super here? Well, they're definitely there. They're up there, aren't they? And this is what people want to see. They want to see the bees going up into the super, but there was no special trick, there was no secret sauce, there was no silver bullet. There was just empty frames of foundation like this, and I would say that's probably the best thing that you can actually do to tempt them up there. You don't have much control in terms of what you're putting in your supers, you can control the frames and you can control the foundation, and I have found that by far and away the best thing to put in all of your frames, whether it's the brood box or the super, is really good quality fresh beeswax only. But my recommendation to you for tempting bees up into the super is get your timing right, get the space on before the colony expands. Don't worry that they've not used that space straight away. It might take a week, might take 2 weeks, but give them the best possible chance of going up into it by using really nice quality beeswax foundation. If you wanna get the best out of your bees, check out our online course, 14-Day Beekeeper, that will turn you from a beginner to a competent beekeeper in just 2 weeks.
