Saturday, February 22, 2014

Adding Supers

It is only February and I am already throwing on all of my honey supers! This year has been very warm so far (with very little rain). This might be a strange season for honey...

This year I am trying to switch over to RiteCell frames - these are very sturdy, inflexible plastic frames. Before I had used foundation with a very thin flexible sheet of plastic coated in wax. It holds up pretty well, but I wanted to try these RiteCell frames:


During my last inspection, I threw on supers filled with RiteCell frames. Green hive is doing an amazing job filling them up with honey and brood, here is a RiteCell frame that I put in the hive about a month ago:


Purple hive seemed to be honey-bound... meaning I didn't see a whole lot of brood in there, mostly just honey and nectar. I threw another super on top so they had a spot to put nectar, hopefully that helps. I did start to see some drone cells, so maybe I can split these hive soon. Splitting is when you take frames with eggs and larve and move them into a fresh hive, this will turn one hive into two. I don't have a whole lot more space for hives, so I will probably sell the new hives if I am successful.

Here are the three hives! I'm almost out of supers! Time to order some more:



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