From: Julia Graham <jlg7001@humboldt.edu>
Date: Tue, 04 Sep 2001 11:11:32 -0700
To: BiologicalBeekeeping@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: how many supers for the winter?

At 02:08 AM 9/3/01 -0500, Kevin wrote:

> Not to recap your whole note.. but, it's important as to where the
> brood is. Is there any brood in the meduim (middle one)? If not, then
> just pull and harvest from that one... or... a little more creative
> approach would be the following...

Hiya Kevin (and all),
As it turned out, I didn't have to worry about what "order" to put the supers in because
a: I messed up and
b: there wasn't enough honey for me to pull.

How did I mess up? I assumed that since there was plenty of larvae present in the bottom super, the queen was there when I put the queen excluder
on. I would be wrong. :) The queen was up TOP. When I went to pull that
box on Friday, I was stunned to see tons of larvae in the box. It wasn't
until a bit later that I realized I must have trapped the queen up
top. Sheesh. But it was okay because I also discovered that I must have
put the additional supers on too early last year because all of the boxes
had at least 3 outer frames empty of comb (and therefore, of honey). So
after I combined all the frames, I had just enough to have the brood box
surrounded by frames of honey and have a deep super about 8/10 full up
top. So I'm gonna leave the honey for the bees this year, since extracting
3 frames of honey would probably be *just* enough to prime the extractor. ;-) But I do need to place Apistan strips NOW, since it's September. Will do
that tonight after work if the weather is decent.

Thanks for all the advice and suggestions from the list. I do have one
more question...and then I'll go back to lurking. Because this is my first
year, the hive is not vented, but I noticed a bunch of moisture when I
opened the lid Friday. I know I'll need to vent the hive for the winter
rains, but how should I do this? Prop the lid open? I don't use an inner
cover, so I'm concerned that rain will get in the hive and they'll stay
colder. Drill a hole in one of the boxes? Or do I need to do this at
all? Everything I've read seems to say yes.

thanks,
Julia