Wintering the honey super, New York, USA

Zepto, if you are really in DC I’m 90 miles north of you. I keep my bees in three 8 frame deep boxes for winter and then in Spring I place 3-7 medium honey supers on top. The 3 deep boxes pretty much guarantees me I won’t have to feed them fondant during the winter months. With the 3 deep boxes they will fill most of the bottom box with pollen and a little brood near the top/center of that box, the middle box will be mostly brood with honey on the outside, the top box will be brood on the lower portion of the middle frames and the rest will be all honey. Think of the brood nest like a football standing on end.
Happy beekeeping and bring on Spring!!

In the pic you can see the winter cluster hanging out at the top away from the entrance (no frost).

This pic is a friends hives demonstrating the difference in winter cluster size in a 3 deep hive vs 2 deep

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Gotta love that FLIR! :smile:

My hubby has a FLIR One, he will be delighted to find a new use for it.

Dawn

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Now that is a toy I could play with

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…and get ready to be doing this LOL

I have a couple…relics from a past life.
I prefer just pressing my ear against the side of the box.
What a lovely sound in the middle of winter :sunny:

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Mine are paediatric and neonatal Littmanns… :wink:
Doesn’t really get cold enough here to need to use them on bees though. :mask:

Dawn

If I get a cypress super, do you think the color would vary significantly from cedar after treatment with tung oil?

I have some pine inner covers, and a nice pine roof with copper flashing. It is obviously different from the cedar - will try to get some pictures later. Whether it bothers you or not, is another question. Plus, I am not sure how they will weather - they might look quite different over time, given that the cedar goes silver if the seal wears off.

@Anon has some lovely “patchwork” hives with a beautiful variety of colors, but they are all painted. They do look good though. :smile:
http://forum.honeyflow.com/t/bee-photographs/630/128?u=dawn_sd

Beekeepers love seeing a few corpses in the snow each day. It lets us know the hive is alive and the undertaker bees are doing their jobs.

All hives are confirmed alive after blizzardgeddon 2016 via stethoscope. If unsure, just give a knock on the hive and listen for the pitch to go up an octave lol.

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I can’t remember the last time I had snow round the hives. 2008? maybe.
It’s Late January, we’ve had 14˚ C here today with bees bringing in minute quantities of pollen!

It seems like cypress may be close enough to the look of the treated cedar supers to match. I did some searching for examples of cypress treated w/ Tung oil, and came up w/ this site:
http://workshopcompanion.com/Wood/Cypress/Cypress_pop.htm

BeeThinking has the cedar boxes. BrushyMountain has cypress.

I have both :wink:

In the following photos the western red cedar (WRC) is BeeThinking, and the inner cover plus roof/lid is Brushy Mountain:


The bottom board is from BeeThinking, as is the deep. On top of the deep is a Brushy Mountain inner cover, treated with Tung Oil. Next layer up is a BeeThinking medium, unsealed (I only just put it together!). The lid/roof is Brushy Mountain, also after 2 coats of Tung oil. You can see how different the colors of the different woods are, but you can also see how much the WRC changes after Tung Oil - the pine/cypress changes much less.

In case it is clearer, I took out the unsealed medium in this photo:

Not intolerable for an outer cover with an overhang, but I am not sure I would like it if it was a box. Plus the cypress is much heavier than the WRC - I like the lighter weight boxes. :smile:

Hope that helps.

Dawn

23lb per cubic foot for WRC against 32lb per cubic foot for cypress…
:hushed:

That is excellent! Thank you for posting the pics. I’m probably going to go w/ the BeeThinking cedar boxes, b/c the free shipping minimum is $100 vs $150 at Brushy. Plus, your point about the weight of the wood is very helpful.

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Oh Dawn, that is such a beautiful stack of boxes.
Makes my plastic hives look like fish boxes

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Why thank you so much, Dee. But I am sure that your bees are very cozy and safe in their plastic boxes!

:blush:

Dawn

So glad to help. BeeThinking are a much more “boutique” company than Brushy Mountain - they really care about their customers, and their customer service is excellent. Plus @beethinking (the owner of the company!) keeps an eye on things here, to make sure everything is going well. I think you will enjoy working with them.

Dawn

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My advice:

Build your hives to 3 eight frame deeps. I’ve never had to feed a nuc. They are a colony with honey, pollen, a foraging force, and queen. They are quite capable of achieving 3 deep status in the same season, then next year, place your supers. When you’re done harvesting, put your supers, hoses, etc. away for the season, take care of the mites, and leave the bees to their 3 deeps.
I manage 4 hives for a local flower grower. Bees got to be too much for him so he pretty much gave me the hives so I just leave them on his property. Anyway he fed those things sugar syrup for an entire season and now in my 2 years of managing them I’m still having to throw away capped frames in the honey supers because it’s sugar. I’ve scraped those frames clean and they build more wax and pull more sugar syrup up from the brood nest and place it in the super. Bees move stores around; I’ve proved it and it’s nasty and gritty. He must not have mixed it very well.
Anyway, this has worked best for me here in NJ.

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You’re right there
Here in the UK even small farmers market sellers get their honey tested for sucrose.
(not invariably, mind…just occasionally)

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My medium super from beethinking arrived this week - assembled today. It’s a smidge (1/4") narrower than the flow langstroth, but the difference isn’t significant and shouldn’t affect the placement of the flow super.

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