BBKA Forum

British Beekeepers Association Official Forum 

  • Storing wet supers

  • share the funny, scary & the completely stupid things you've seen & heard
share the funny, scary & the completely stupid things you've seen & heard
 #48  by Patrick
 21 Jul 2018, 20:41
I could probably fill this forum just under the section "How not to keep bees" if I mentioned all the things I have tried and didn't work / tried and got wrong because I didn't really understand what was going on / tried because I was hurrying and messed up / tried because i couldn't think what else to do. If somebody thinks they have never ever messed up when keeping bees that is because either they haven't kept bees very long, they have been exceptionally lucky or they are probably delusional !

Messing up the first time is excusable, its when I have done it again and again that I get really exasperated!

I store my unused supers in my bee shed which is close to my main apiary. Once paradichlorobenzine (PDB) crystals were banned for using as waxmoth repellents in stored supers, I looked around for alternative means to dissuade waxmoth from rearing brood in stored supers. Anyone who has encountered long deserted equipment infested with wax moth is unlikely to forget it - its a total frass, cucoon and silk shambles. After extraction I decided to try storing supers "wet" i.e. with the residual honey still on them, which was supposed to be less attractive to moths. What the books did not mention (but with hindsight I could have guessed) was that the stacks had to be totally bee tight. Mine were obviously not. Nearby bees were drawn to the stacks in their thousands. The shed was in manic bee chaos!

I decided to withdraw and let them sort it out - a second mistake which led to lots of bees fighting with each other and many fatalities, they cleaned up all the residual honey and left the supers dry anyway.

If you ever find yourself in a similar position, suit up and puff your smoker until the whole space is evacuated of bees clear and seal up the supers then regroup. In practice in the years since I have only ever stored dry extracted supers and never suffered from wax moth (or robbing bees). I never store frames that have been bred in by a queen, as it is those that particularly attract the moths and that caterpillars can really flourish in. Try not to store old brood combs or if you do, separate them from clean combs and consider freezing them to kill off any moth eggs. A cold winter spell may do it for you as long as they are not stored somewhere frost proof.

Storing wet supers will not be an experiment repeated by me at least..!
 #73  by Patrick
 22 Jul 2018, 21:40
Nice one! Reckon you might be better at keeping super stacks bee proof than I was in that case.. :x
 #442  by langstroth2
 29 Aug 2018, 12:23
Leaving wet supers temporarily in a beeshed and then

a) Forgetting the few tucked in a corner and finding them weeks later operating as a wax moth breeding centre
b) leaving the bee shed door open by accident, and finding thousands of bees inside thanking for the unexpected food bonanza
 #5737  by Justabeekeeper
 18 Feb 2020, 00:30
I always store supers wet. I made boards that seal the top and bottom of the stack.
It's ok until the stack gets knocked and 1000 wasps move in. Those things damage the comb nearly as much as waxmoth.
Bonus of having wasps in the boxes is no waxmoth, every cloud as they say.