The modern Langstroth beehive is a vertically stacked, modular system designed to separate the colony’s living space from the beekeeper’s harvest. This structure requires keeping the brood (eggs, larvae, and pupae) separate from the colony’s main honey reserves. Beekeepers manage this separation by adding specialized boxes called supers, which are placed above the primary brood chamber. The placement and timing of these supers are fundamental to hive management, ensuring the bees have adequate space to store surplus honey.
Defining the Honey Super
A honey super is a detachable box placed on top of the brood chamber, the area where the queen lays eggs and the young are raised. Its sole function is to provide space for the storage of surplus honey, which is the honey the beekeeper intends to harvest. Any box placed above the brood nest to collect harvestable honey is considered a super.
To ensure the super contains only honey and no developing bees, beekeepers often employ a queen excluder. This perforated barrier is positioned between the brood chamber and the super. It features precise gaps that allow smaller worker bees to pass through but block the larger queen bee, preventing her from laying eggs. Inside the super, frames hold the foundation, which guides the worker bees to build straight comb for efficient honey storage and extraction.
Physical Differences in Super Types
Supers are categorized by their height, which influences their capacity and weight when full of honey. The three standard sizes are the shallow (approximately 5 3/4 inches), the medium (6 5/8 inches), and the deep (9 5/8 inches). The choice of size is a trade-off between honey volume and ease of lifting.
A standard 10-frame deep super, when filled with capped honey, can weigh between 80 to 90 pounds, making it challenging to lift. For this reason, deep boxes are typically reserved for the brood chamber and rarely used as honey supers. Medium supers, sometimes called “Illinois” supers, offer a more manageable weight of 50 to 70 pounds when full.
The shallow super is the lightest option, weighing around 40 to 50 pounds when ready for harvest. This size is often preferred by hobbyists or beekeepers with physical limitations. Equipment also varies in width, with both 10-frame and 8-frame versions available. The narrower 8-frame equipment reduces the overall weight of a full box by roughly 10 to 15 pounds, though it requires using more boxes to achieve the same total honey volume as a 10-frame setup.
Timing and Placement of Supers
The process of adding a super to a beehive is called “supering.” Timing is essential to maximize honey production and prevent the colony from preparing to swarm. Beekeepers look for signs of a strong nectar flow and hive congestion, often following the “80% rule.” This rule suggests a new super should be added when the bees have drawn comb and are actively using about 8 out of the 10 frames in the topmost box.
Adding the super too late can cause the bees to run out of storage space, which triggers swarming. Once the need for a super is identified, a beekeeper must decide on the placement technique: top-supering or bottom-supering. Top-supering involves placing the empty super directly on top of the stack of existing honey supers.
Conversely, bottom-supering (sometimes called nadiring) places the empty super immediately above the queen excluder and below the partially filled boxes. While bottom-supering is more labor-intensive because it requires lifting all the upper boxes, research indicates there is no statistically significant difference in honey yield between the two methods. Therefore, the easier top-supering is often the common choice.