I hate to ask a stupid question but what's a super? Any other bee vocabulary I need to know about? The queen I understand, drones too....

Ted

-- Ted Hart (tedhart71@hotmail.com), January 19, 2001

Answers

A super is one of the boxes that makes up the container in which bees make their hive. There are different sizes of supers for different reasons and there can be one to many supers going to make up the entire hive.

Actually the hive is what the bees make on the inside, but for simplicity the entire unit of boxes is called a hive.

-- R. (thor610@yahoo.com), January 19, 2001.

Ted, No stupid questions. I, just started keeping bees. The best advice was from the extension agent. They usually will offer beginner courses on this topic. A deep super is another name for a hive body where the bees raise their young. A medium or a shallow super is used to make and store the honey in which the bees produce.

These last supers sit on top of the hive body and are often separated from the hive body by an item called a queen excluder. This allows the sterile female workers to enter the top supers to make and store honey but prevents the fertile queen, who is larger, from entering and depositing eggs. Hope this helps.

-- glory (mornglorfarm@ncconnect.com), January 19, 2001.

All of the above answer are technically correct. Once you have been beekeeping awhile, talk to experienced beekeepers or maybe it is just regional, but we call the large supers where the bees raise their young and where the queen hangsout is a BROOD BOX(s). In the spring when the flow is on, you would then "super" your hive. This meaning you would put on your honey supers. So to keep it simple, the bottom boxes you do not remove and these are Brrod Boxes and the boxes you put on to get the excess honey are "supers".

-- Laura (LauraLeekis@home.com), January 20, 2001.

I agree, no stupid questions. Popular terminology among beekeepers varies by region and gets very confusing. Here in the Pacific Northwest we refer to the bottom two boxes as "deeps" or "hive bodies". These make up the permanent home for the colony. During honey production we add "honey supers", also called "westerns" to the top as needed to accomodate the honey flow. Around here the deeps are 9-5/8" high and the westerns are 6-5/8" high (actual dimesions can vary by 1/8"). I've seen boxes that are about 8" high and a few that are about 5" high, but these are not common. Most extractors are designed to take frames from a western or a deep. Mine holds six western frames or three deep frames. We use the westerns mostly because a deep full of honey is almost too heavy to pick up, especially off the top of a four foot tall hive when it's stuck down with propolis. Go to my website for some good links to beekeeping resources: http://www.sundaycreek.com/honey.htm Happy to answer any other questions. Feel free to email me any time. Happy beekeeping. P.S. If you are getting into beekeeping, I urge you to contact your State Department of Agriculture Apiarist. I generally detest government involvement in personal pursuits, but there are some really seroius threats to beekeeping worldwide which you need to be fully educated on to protect not only your own bees, but everyone else's bees as well, both hobby and commercial. Without honey bees to pollinate crops, we'll all go hungry. There are a number of diseases and parasites that require careful management to prevent loss of your colonies and spread of the diseases to other colonies. (Wild Honey Bee colonies are virtually extinct in North America because of these.) One in particular, the Varroa Mite, is becoming resistant to the pesticide commonly used so that most states have enacted emergency measures to allow the use a new, but very nasty chemical to control the mites. The bees cannot cope with the Varroa Mite and it will destroy a colony quickly if not dealt with. Please register with your state apiarist and practice sound hive management.

-- Skip Walton (sundaycreek@gnrac.net), January 20, 2001.