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  • Honey super still on top of my brood box’s

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General Q&A, Bee chat and only Bee chat please
 #5072  by Beckley.Bees
 23 Oct 2019, 15:40
Hi I was advised to put my honey supers back on my hives to let my bee’s clean up.
But they put more honey back in.
It’s the end of October and I still got one super on each hive.
I have the brood box then the crown board on top with one bee escape removed.
Then one super on top of that.
No Queen excluder.
Should I just keep a eye on them and remove the feeder when they have empty them.
 #5073  by NigelP
 23 Oct 2019, 17:07
This time of year I'd take out your crown board and stick it on top of the super...so order is brood -super -crown board. Close off ALL the holes in the crown board and add a slab of insulation on top.

It's not clear from your post where your feeder is...if it's on top of the super above a crown-board you have, I'm afraid, made a right pigs ear of things...
 #5074  by AdamD
 23 Oct 2019, 18:06
Some years a decent colony can fill a super of ivy honey in my parts of the world, so hopefully you have hives that have plenty of food for winter. As Nigel suggests, the easiest thing is to take out the crown-board and pop the super back on. (And, yes some insulation on top). In spring you may need to move the bees down from the supers by ensuring the queen is below the queen excluder when you put it back in.
 #5076  by Caroline
 23 Oct 2019, 19:57
Follow the advice given by Nigel and Adam.

The theory is bees will 'dry' wet supers after extraction if you place them back on the hives with a barrier between the super(s) and the brood box (typically a piece of plastic with a hole in the middle, no bigger than a 10 pence piece, or a crown board with a small hole), the idea being that the bees think they have stores they are unable to defend because it is 'outside of the nest', and so they will lap up any wet stores and take it down into the brood box. I suspect this is the advice you followed.

Sometimes it works really well and sometimes it doesn't. It may depend on the strain of bee, weather, location, and anything else you can think of. If there is any kind of nectar flow then they will more than likely not 'dry' the super and will instead use it for storing what they bring in. If the hole is too big (i.e. the oval feeder hole in a crown board) they may also not do as you intend.

I made 'drying boards', which are crown boards that have one feeder hole blocked with a strip of plastic and the middle hole covered with the top of a porter bee escape secured with two drawing pins, to create a smaller central hole. I used to use plastic sheeting but the bees used to stick it to the top bars of the brood frames and it was a sod to remove.
 #5078  by NigelP
 23 Oct 2019, 22:07
Caroline wrote:
23 Oct 2019, 19:57

Sometimes it works really well and sometimes it doesn't.
It rarely works...better to simply put extracted supers on top (no barrier) and 2-3 days latter put clearing board under them.
We make life difficult for ourselves.
I'd tell you how I get all mine cleared within 24 hours but it contravenes all BBKA and bee forum advice.
It works but it aint mainstream....
 #5079  by Patrick
 24 Oct 2019, 08:17
As Caroline points out, the size of the hole left in the crownboard seems quite important and also how long it is left on for. As mentioned, a few bee widths is all that is necessary to give them access and leaving more than a couple of days when a flow is on may indeed reverse the process!

I tend to clear all my empty supers over just a few lighter hives. A big mixed stack of mainly empty wet supers seems to trigger the robbing impulse and encourage them to clear it. But double check the stack is externally bee tight and the roof settled in place or there may be a ruck it is dominated by one colony with strangers getting in.

Nigel - I am having mysterious visions which include a huge stack of supers standing on a floor in a field... are these caused by too much spicy food last night?
 #5081  by NigelP
 24 Oct 2019, 09:39
Nope, but as I'm petty isolated all the purports of doom, robbing and disease simply don't happen...and it's all finished in less than a day. We pass on our untruths far too frequently when with a little testing we can see that what happens is nothing like "the books" describe.