spring management

Hi There, My question is about introducing a deep super. I was taught by a beekeeper to use medium supers rather than deeps (not the traditional way of beekeeping). Now, I would like to start to introduce deeper supers for the brood chamber. Over the winter, I had 2 full mediums supers with a...

Hi All, third year beekeeper here in the Hudson Valley of NY. Let me get this out of the way... I know that all beekeeping is local and that generalizations are very hard to make. So, now I'm going to ask for generalizations :) One of the toughest parts of beekeeping seems to be...

I have a sideline business in central Mississippi. I still have less than 200 hives but am running into a problem. I assumed/estimated I would need about 100 supers for my first supering event this year. I pulled my supers out of storage where they had been shrink-wrapped with paramoth over...

For fun I took a video of the girls flying around on the first warm day of March so far after the heavy snows. I thought the iPhone would take a better video! I laid out a little plate of dry pollen to see if they would take it and I put it on the ground in the top feeder I had hanging around...

Central Maryland, NewBeek here. Second year hive. I Checkerboarded above the deep with 2 mediums in mid-march. Now the 2 mediums above are around 70% full. Think I should Checkerboard with a third medium and split up the third empty frames between the 3 med supers? OR just throw the empty...

We're getting a way early spring, my peaches are already peak and the bees are bringing stuff in. I was considering trying to "open up the brood" box by removing a single deep frame (cuz that's what I hear your supposed to do). But was wondering what to do with the frame. As in, I hate to...

My first colony has made it through the winter (thus far). I put a candy board in early January as insurance. The temps are finally warm as our snow pack is melting away (upper peninsula of MI). I have not inspected hive other than looking in the top briefly and noticed that the cluster is in...

Beekeepers. Say you want to eliminate the chore of reversing hive bodies from your management routine. How do you do it? In my experience, if left to their own devices the queen will reside in the top box and leave the bottom (two deep brood chamber) until it becomes empty and will eventually...