Happy Busy Bees - 1st Year Hive - Should I Extract Honey or Add Another Super?

Hello, and welcome to the community!

Looks like you’re in the honey!

What’s your current set up? I’m assuming you have a single deep brood box with a queen excluder and a flow super?

Even though there are some side discussions about multiple flow supers, this really isn’t necessary in most circumstances because you can just harvest the honey before they run out of space. This is different than in a traditional langstroth hive set up.

The honey in the flow super will need to be extracted one way or another before winter… it can’t stay on the hive for a number of reasons, including: crystallization, abandonment of the queen below the queen excluder, or brood in the flow frames of you remove the excluder.

I’m guessing that your local climate leads most beekeepers in your area to overwinter with (likely wrapped/insulated) double deep brood boxes. This is really the question that needs to be answered before deciding to put the flow super on. With a traditional honey super, you can always just decide to leave it for the bees, but this isn’t the case with the flow frames.

If it is indeed the case that you need a double deep setup, then ideally you would have put the second brood box on instead of the flow super but that ship has sailed.

Do you have access to drawn comb that you can put in a second brood box? Ultimately your bees will need to draw frames for a second box, which is energy intensive. You can feed them back the honey in your super or you can feed them sugar syrup/candy/granulated sugar. But even with feeding, they may not be inclined to draw a full box of frames at this time of year.

You might be able to overwinter your colony in a single deep but that may be challenging in the cowboy state.

I hope that helps. Let us know what plan you come up with and maybe we can help more.

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