Although the beehive looks to us like a large collection of creatures, in a certain sense it functions as a single organism, with the queen as a key organ in its function. The workers are constantly monitoring their queen for health effectiveness, and if she is not performing adequately for the needs of the hive, they will supersede her.

Many things can signal a queen that is not meeting the best needs of the hive. A queen’s laying of eggs can slow down or stop, so that she is not producing the two thousand eggs per day expected of a healthy queen during the active part of the season. She could be laying in an uneven pattern instead of the tight pattern that is normal for the hive. She could not be fertilizing her eggs effectively, yielding a high proportion of drone brood instead of worker brood. Or she could overall just be old and not able to do her job. In any of these cases, the hive will arrange to supersede her, that is to say replace her with a new and more effective queen.

The nurse bees will build a cell in the middle of the frame in which hangs vertically rather than horizontally in the frame, and when an egg is laid in it, they will feed the larva nothing but royal jelly so that it will develop into a new queen. When the new queen emerges in sixteen days, either she or the workers themselves will kill the old queen or eject her from the hive. At this point the hive as an organism is back to full health, and can proceed normally.

Finding supersedure cells on the frames in your hive does not necessarily mean that your queen is failing. Sometimes the bees like to build a few supersedure cells just in case of problems, such as an emergency supersedure if the queen is suddenly lost or killed by a careless beekeeper or other circumstance. But if the appearance of the cells happens at the same time you see spotty laying patterns or excessive drone brood, you probably have a supersedure situation, and may want to replace the queen directly yourself before the new queen hatches. But you don’t have to — your healthy hive is taking good care of itself.

The super box may be the favorite piece of the backyard beekeeper’s hive, since it’s the part that allows the beekeeper to taste the results of their hard work — the honey! Bees in a new hive begin by filling up the deep boxes that hold the brood and the first stores of honey that the bees will keep for themselves over the winter. Most beekeepers will provide their bees two boxes of deep frames for this purpose.

Starting two weeks after the initial installation of your bees into a new hive, check them weekly to see if they have filled most of the lower boxes. This will take less time if you have provided built out frames instead of blank foundation. When eight of the ten frames in the upper box are full, go ahead and add a super box to the top of the hive. By early June, most beekeepers should have put some supers on the hive if they hope to collect a harvest that season.

Generally, a shallower box is used for a honey super, because a deep box full of honey weighs about 75 pounds, too much for most beekeepers to lift from the top of a stack. Some people also choose to add a queen excluder between the main hive and the supers to ensure that no brood is laid in the super box, but other beekeepers find this unnecessary and feel that this impedes the movement of the workers who are storing the honey as well.

Add another super whenever the current one is nearly full, or when you know a new nectar flow is beginning. If you will be going away on a summer vacation, leave an extra box or two on your hive before leaving. Not only will you ensure that you get all of the honey you should, but bees who are overcrowded will slow down production, start putting honey in cells where brood should be laid and create a honey bound situation in the hive, or even prepare to swarm.

Adding extra supers too soon can cause the bees to chimney, building up into a new box before they fill in the lower box. However, you can always rearrange the frames to put full ones into the lower super, so the risk of having too many supers is lower that the risk of having too few.

It’s spring, and you are ready to expand your beeyard! Installing package bees in your hive is not hard, but can be a bit intimidating if you have not done it before.

Make sure your hive box is set up before your packaged bees arrive. Building and painting your boxes and frames is a good winter activity while you wait for the spring thaw. You should install your bees into a single deep box, but have the second box prepared in case your bees work quickly.

Bees will arrive in a screened wooden box with a feeding container of sugar syrup in the center. The box will usually contain 3 lbs of bees, or about 15,000 bees. The queen will be suspended in the middle in a small wooden box, corked with a piece of sugar candy sealing the opening behind the cork. The bees will be calm, not having a home to defend yet, but spraying them lightly will sugar syrup before you begin will prevent them from flying away.

Leave one frame out of your hive deep so you can make a bigger gap between the frames, and suspend the queen cage between the frames with tacks. If the bees have been traveling with their queen in the box for a few days, they have probably already accepted her as their queen. In this case, you can remove the cork from the queen cage, and invert the box of bees above the hive. They will go in easily to where their queen is within the hour, and will eat the candy and release her in a few days.

If your queen has traveled separately or you acquire your bee package soon after the queen is put in, leave the cork in for a few days so that the bees do not attack her, but instead get used to her. After about 3 days, you can remove the cork and let the bees eat the candy and release her safely. In this case, you may need to shake the box of bees over your hive box to get them inside more quickly, and they have less motivation to just walk inside.

After about a week, check that your queen has been released, and that brood has begun to be laid in the box. Once you see this, you will know your hive is off to a successful start!

While beekeeping can be fun and enjoyable, there’s one thing that should be kept in mind while taking care of these gold and black insects–swarming. The natural way to propagate new colonies, swarming needs to be strictly controlled to prevent new hives from being formed in inconvenient places. One of the best ways to do this is by splitting the hives before swarming occurs. There are many signs of swarming, with some being easily visible and others less so.

During the first year of a queen’s life, generally only overcrowding will precipitate a swarm. However, for hives with older queens, careful management is required to keep the hive from attempting to swarm. The more visible signs of possible swarming include overcrowding, a rapid increase in the population of worker bees, queen cup construction, capped or sealed queen cells, and increasing restlessness in the queen bee. A few less visible signs include weight loss by the queen bee, weight gain by the worker bees, and a cessation in egg laying by the queen.

Once a possible swarming situation is identified, it is a good idea to split the hive as soon as possible. This is done by removing the queen bee along with several frames of brood eggs and bees to create a new nucleus colony. These frames should be placed into a properly prepared hive box after being checked for capped supersedure cells. Supersedure cells should not be placed in the same hive as the queen. A feeder must be kept in the hive and the entrance should be blocked for several days to keep the bees from escaping before adopting the new hive as their own.

Splitting can be a bit difficult, but if done properly, produces two thriving hives. Things to remember include: make sure to split the resources of the hives equally between the two new hives, check before splitting to ensure that there are new queen cells that can be left in the hive from which the queen is being removed, and take special care to provide the hives with resources while they recover from the split.

Anyone interested in beekeeping needs to know the ins and outs. One of the responsibilities that beekeepers have is to take care of the bees during the winter, when there is no plant life available to sustain them. Therefore, the beekeeper must learn how to feed the bees. It is typical to feed bees using sugar water during the winter and the spring before bloom, so that the bees will have enough stores of food to survive this time period.

Let’s first mix sugar water or syrup. I like to use a ratio of sugar to water of 1 to 1. Mix the sugar and water together and heat this mixture on the stove. This mixture will take a while to dissolve into syrup. It needs to come to a boil and stay boiling for at least one whole minute before it will begin to dissolve, but don’t allow it to caramelize. After the mixture has boiled, remove it from the heat and allow it to cool.

After it is created, there are a number of ways to physically feed your bees. One is by placing a plastic bag full the sugary mixture inside the hive. You can also make or buy a beehive feeder. If you decide to make the feeder, you will need to purchase a feeding base specifically for bees. Once you have your feeding base, you can use any type of clean container that will fit well inside the feeder base when inverted. Cut a few holes in the top of the container lid so that the bees can get access to the water.

When you are ready to feed your bees, take your bee feeder base, container, and syrup to the hive. Place the feeder base inside the hive (between the bottom and top covers). Then fill your container with syrup and reattach the lid. Turn the container upside down and place inside the base. If you are using plastic bags to feed your bees, lower the bags into the hive carefully and use a knife to cut an opening in it so the bees can reach the syrup inside. It is important not to leave the sugar syrup outside where other insects can get to it, thus the importance of placing the feeders or bags inside the hive.

From season to season, it may be necessary to move your beehives to a new location. The best time to do this is in winter, when not much else is going on in your beehives, and the bees are clustered in the hive from the cold. This is the time when there are the fewest bees in your hive, so the hive will be lighter and quieter, and if it is below 50F, there will be no foraging or cleansing flights going on so no bees will be lost due to being out during the transfer.

Make sure the hive is fully secured so it can be moved in one piece without the bees escaping. Entrances should be covered firmly with screen material. Do not cover entrances with tape or there will be no ventilation in the hive and the bees will be damaged. All boxes should be attached to one another and to the bottom board with duct tape or hive staples, and any cracks should also be taped up. Enlist the help of a second person in moving your secured hive, and move it as gently as possibly so as not to disturb the winter cluster.

If your bees are being relocated by truck or trailer, lift the whole hive on to the flatbed, keeping it vertical, and tie it extremely tightly. A hive that falls over in transit will release thousands of confused, angry bees, which can be very dangerous! When you arrive at the new location, place the hives gently down, and then reopen the entrances so your bees can proceed normally.

Check any insulation you have on the hives after they have been moved, and make sure it is still intact for the remainder of the winter. If the hives seem lighter than expected when you lift them, then this is also a good time to provide bee candy as supplementary food. As soon as the bees are ready to forage in the spring, they will have no trouble working with the new location.