Normal after extracting/replacing supers?

[D Coates]

I extracted for the second time this year and things went well. I pulled the supers (7) off in the morning, extracted and put them back on in the evening. I did not use smoke to replace the wet supers and the hives were very calm when I put them on there. About 5 minutes later as I was looking for a dropped hive tool I noticed one of the hives had bees boiling out of the hive. They flew out maybe 5 to 10 feet, reveiwing the front of the hive and then kind of hovered around the front of the hive going in and out seemingly very confused.

When I watched the rest of the extracted hives I noticed the same on 3 of the 4 hive were doing the same. There was no fighting at all so robbing doesn't appear likely especially since all of my strong hives were equally disrupted.

All I used to get the bees out of the supers was a leaf blower, no fume board of any form. All the hives are healthy. I did not keep the supers hive specific. I merely putting them back on to be cleaned and refilled for winter and possibly an additional extraction.

I had not noticed this last the time I extracted, but then again I didn't stick around afterwords. Is this normal?

[Pete0]

I add my back above the inner cover. The bees will clean them out and take the wet down below and store it. Adding the the supers below the inner cover and not returning to the original hive may have cause the behavior.

Pete0
Bena, VA

[Kevin M]

D Coates...i did the same thing, extracted a med. super, and put it back on the hive. I did put an inner cover below the extracted super and screened inner cover ( the one from Brushy Mt.) above it, in the moving position, so no robbers could enter from the top,then migratory cover on that..
Well, in about 5-10 minutes, all hell broke loose...! Honeybees, yellowjackets all over the place....It actually looked like swarming was starting...I thought to myself, this is not good...! It was pretty wild around that hive for a couple hrs before this calmed down.This is the first time i ever put and extracted super back on the hive to clean out..
I guess if the same thing happened to you, it must be normal bee-havior..

[MichaelW]

I tried putting wet supers on hives for the first time this year as well. I didn't like the results.

I put them above an innercover with an empty box then 2-4 extracted supers. A few days later the supers where still wet and the hives where attracting lots of bees trying to rob. The hives where fairly strong though so no robbing took place.

So I took them off and placed them on end in my driveway, as usual, with some space between each super. After an evening of a feeding frenzy, they where all cleaned up with very few dead bees.

[Dan Williamson]

While I have certainly seen hives with attempts at robbing after putting on wet supers not all frenzied activity has been robbing.

Sometimes it seems to just stimulate excitement in the hive itself that seems to cause a little frenzy outside the hive entrance itself. I've seen this just feeding sometimes in the spring. Hives that had very little activity suddenly had a frenzy of activity at the entrance after placing syrup on the colony. It just seemed to stimulate excitement.

[D Coates]

I watched the hives yesterday at noon and they seemed to be back to normal. I guess the reaction could be considered normal but because this is only my second harvest I hadn't noticed it before. I intentionally didn't put an inner cover under the wet supers as the hives are quite full of bees and I wanted to lower the level of congestion. There's also the chance they could fill the supers again as the soybeans are still active and the Goldenrod is about to begin.

Everyone's feedback has been greatly appreciated, that's one of the things I love about this site.

[Andrew@ThreeElms]

Oh good, I'm glad Micheal doesn't like the result. I tried it this year, above and below the inner cover. This year I've had 2 different problems come up.

1. The queen ran up into the super and laid all over the place. When I went to go pull them there was 2 frames of eggs.

2. The bees cleaned them, and started reloading them with nectar.

I just put them out and let them rob them out. Nice and clean very quickly.