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7/29/2019 Reversing Hives: From Natural Beekeeping
1/7
Organic Approaches to Modern ApicultureREVISED AND EXPANDED EDITIO N
m pNATURAL BE EK EE PI NG
ROSS CONRAD
7/29/2019 Reversing Hives: From Natural Beekeeping
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for the queen to lay eggs. When using a system
where the main hive consists of two shallow hiv
bodies with a deep hive body sandwiched betwee
them, the positions of the shallows are reversed.
the hive proper consists of two deep hive bodie
then the position of each deep is switched. In thmanagement system I use, this is how a shallo
overflow hive body ends up beneath the dee
hive body. The nuc or package of bees begins th
year in the deep hive body. By the time winter
approaching, the hive has a shallow (or two) o
honey above the deep box containing the broo
nest. In the spring, most of the bees are up in th
shallow and the deep is mostly empty, so the pos
tion of the boxes is reversed and the shallow on to
is now placed on the bottom. Given that the process of reversing a colony involves taking the hiv
apart, this is a good time to clean up the equipmen
a bit. The following is one example of how to g
about reversing, cleaning, and inspecting a hive i
early spring.
First of all, when you walk up to a hive, it is be
to approach from either the side or the rear of th
colony. Its not a good idea to position yourse
directly in front of a hive, because the foragers th
are coming and going from the front entrance ma
interpret your actions as trying to block their pat
and may feel threatened enough to defend the
turf with their stingers. After blowing some smok
into allthe entrances of the hive, lift the outer cov
and send a puff or two of smoke under the cov
before removing it. The idea is to let the smok
precede you as you go through the colony, in effe
announcing your presence before you arrive. Plac
the outer cover on the ground a couple feet behin
the hive with the bottom side up. After applyin
a puff of smoke to the bees gathered around thopening of the inner cover, use your hive tool to pr
up a corner of the top super or hive body. As you
hive tool lifts up the corner of the super, send som
smoke into the crack between the supers and con
tinue to pry up until you can stick the entire nos
of your smoker into the space between the boxe
This will allow you to remove the hive tool withou
if sugar and supplements are used over prolonged
periods. Common sense dictates that, like all
creatures, honey bees thrive on wholesome natural
foods, and they suffer when forced to consume the
equivalent of junk food. If protein supplementa-
tion is required, the natural approach, in keeping
with the honey bees biology, is to mix powdered
pollen with just enough honey so that it forms a
dough. Such a patty can be left inside the hive near
the brood area for utilization by the bees.
Reversing a hive is a technique used primarily
to reduce, but not eliminate, a colonys swarm-
ing impulse. Swarming is the act of reproductionwherein a single superorganism, in this case the
colony of bees, breaks into two groups and creates
a replica of itself. It is a natural survival instinct of
the speciesApis mellifera.
A number of factors are believed to influence
a colonys decision to swarm. Among them are: a
crowded hive lacking space for additional brood
rearing; an aging queen (two years old or older);
and an abundance of honey and pollen available to
foragers combined with insufficient storage space.
Preventing an early swarm helps to ensure that
the bees will have time to stow away enough honey
to last the winter before they divide themselves up
and thus reduce their nectar-gathering abilities.
This can be crucial during poor honey years when
the total amount of honey produced by the hive is
low. Reversing also provides an opportunity for the
beekeeper to conduct a thorough inspection of each
colony, so that potential issues may be resolved
before they become acute.
Just like it sounds, the process of reversing acolony simply involves restacking the boxes that
make up the hive so that the bottom hive body
ends up on the top, and vice versa. The intention
is to end up with the brood and honey positioned
as close to the bottom of the hive as possible, with
extra space above. The act of reversing a hive may
also break up the brood nest, creating more space
7/29/2019 Reversing Hives: From Natural Beekeeping
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the distance between the top bars of the frames in
the bottom box and the bottom bars of the frames
in the box above respect the bee space. This can
result in the frames below sticking to the frames
above when the boxes are being pried apart (see
Figure 3-22). When this occurs, bees get crushed
and the top box cannot be lifted off the hive. This
usually causes the beekeeper to drop the box back
down on the hive, squashing even more bees,
which results in the hive taking on an ugly mood.
Whenever you handle supers or hive bodies con-
taining bees, it is best to keep them as level as pos-
sible. When it is not possible or convenient to keep a
box full of bees in a horizontal position, it is impor-
tant to always tilt the hive section so that the shortend faces down toward the ground, thus prevent-
ing the frames from collapsing upon one another
If a nuc or hive body is carried or set down with one
of the long sides facing the ground, gravity will
force the frames together and in the process kill or
injure the bees that are unfortunate enough to get
pressed between the leaves of honey, like flowers in a
FIGURE 3-20.In northern climates, reversing the order of the hives chambers in spring, before they have become overcrowded, candelay the bees swarming instinct, helping to ensure that the colony will have the workforce available to store enough honey to seethem safely through the winter.
the two boxes coming back together and possibly
crushing some bees in the process. With the nose
of the smoker inserted between the supers, squeeze
the bellows a couple times while you reach over
with your free hand to the handhold on the raised
end of the upper chamber and lift it up. If the back
end of the top box is too close to the edge of the box
underneath it, you may have to slide the hive body
being lifted forward a bit to keep it from slipping
off the back end of the hive. After allowing some
smoke to drift over the exposed bees, the top super
with the inner cover still attached can now be lifted
off the hive and placed on the telescoping edges of
the outer cover that is on the ground, so that there is
little chance that the bees on the exposed undersidewill be crushed (see figure 3-24). If more than two
boxes make up the hive, repeat the procedure as
outlined for the top hive body and place the second
hive body off to the side, standing on end.
If a colony is ignored for too long and allowed to
become crowded, the bees will often build burr
comb between the boxes on the hive, even though
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FIGURE 3-21. A well-built smoker can aid the beekeeper by acting as a wedge that prevents supers from collapsing together oncseparated and crushing bees. .
FIGURE 3-22. When frames stick to inner covers or supers above, blow smoke between the supers (or super and inner cover) and pthe frames down away from the inner cover or super without dropping the box (or inner cover) and crushing more bees.
7/29/2019 Reversing Hives: From Natural Beekeeping
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possible. This way, the underutilized space withinthe hive is kept to a minimum, and your equipment
is used most efficiently, because the lions share of
the honey gathered will be stored above the brood
nest in preparation for winter. Sometimes you will
find that a colony that goes into winter with three
hive bodies will, by spring, have all their bees
brood, and honey confined to the uppermost story
of the hive. In this case the bottom hive body can
be taken away and the middle section placed on top
of the hive to provide the needed room for growth.
As a general rule, it is a good idea to match the size
of the cavity within which the colony is housed (the
hive) with the number of bees in the hive. Additional
space should not be added, in the form of a new hive
body or super, until the bees fill up most of the space
they already have. For example, if a hive consists of
four frames of bees and brood and six empty frames
in a ten-frame hive body, then adding another ten-
frame hive body on top would be tantamount to
moving a four-person family into a mansion with
20 rooms. The additional unused space is not onlyunnecessary given that they still have six frames to
expand into, but the extra work of patrolling and
maintaining the space in the additional hive body
can actually be detrimental to the colony.
Positioning the free space within the hive on
top simplifies the process of inspecting the colony
in the future, since all it takes is a peek under the
FIGURE 3-24.The bees appreciate it when the beekeeper makesuse of an inverted outer cover to prevent bees from beingcrushed and grass, dirt, and debris from getting all over thehives boxes and frames when separated.
book. If the queen is one of the victims, the hive may
well suffer a lethal blow at the beekeepers hand.
Once the hive body sitting on the bottom board
has been removed, scrape the bottom board clean of
dirt and debris before returning it to its place as the
floor of the colony. Now you are ready to rebuild the
hive by replacing the hive bodies in reverse order
as compared to their previous position. Unless the
colony is exceptionally strong, or youre late in get-
ting around to reversing them, the former bottom
portion of the hive will likely contain few bees, littlehoney, and no brood. Next to the bottom board is
precisely where you dontwant additional space to
be within the hive. Because the bees natural incli-
nation is to move upward, an empty hive body or
super should be located on top of the hive, and the
boxes filled with the most honey, pollen, bees, and
brood should be positioned as low in the hive as
FIGURE 3-23. Allow a super to slip off the hive during an inspec-tion, and the fun really begins.
7/29/2019 Reversing Hives: From Natural Beekeeping
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new supers of extra-thin foundation, or frames th
allow for naturally drawn comb, are added belo
the full supers to reduce the incidence of trav
stain that occurs when bees constantly wa
across the filled and sealed combs to get to the ne
foundation above. This occurs in much the sam
way that dirt builds up on carpeting in high-traff
areas of your home. By positioning the new super
below the previously filled ones, the appearance o
the final comb honey harvest is greatly improved
Incidentally, queens generally prefer to lay theeggs in the larger spans of comb found in the dee
hive bodies rather than in the smaller shallow o
medium-sized supers. Nevertheless, this prefer
ence will not stop the queen from laying in shallo
supers, especially if the brood nest becomes con
gested and additional space for egg laying become
difficult to find. Although it is inconvenient t
FIGURE 3-25.Allowing the frames of a hive body to collapse together is a good way to squash a queen.
inner cover to tell whether additional room is
needed. Once a colony has filled all but the out-
ermost frames in the top super or hive body, an
empty super should be placed on top to provide
additional space. Back in the old days, beekeepers
placed empty supers just above the brood nest and
beneath the honey supers that the hive had already
filled. This is because the bees will tend to draw
out foundation and fill empty combs located in
the middle of the hive a little faster than when they
are placed at the very top of the colony. Neverthe-less, the disruption to the colony, not to mention
the labor involved with checking the supers and
removing and replacing the full honey supers
every time an empty super needed to be added,
eventually caused this approach to be discontinued
in favor of supering from the top. The one excep-
tion is during the production of comb honey, when
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A major concern with keeping bees in northern
locations is winter survival, but I think far too
much attention is given to concerns about the cold
temperatures that the hive will have to endure. As
long as the hive is strong and healthy with plenty of
adult bees and brood, has an abundance of sealed
honey stored in the combs, and is able to stay dry,
it should have little trouble withstanding the frosty
breath of Old Man Winter. Honey bees are very
intelligent. Rather than trying to keep the entire
interior of the hive warm, the honey bee cluster
serves to focus and conserve the colonys energy by
keeping warm the minimum space necessary for
survival. They do this by warming only the area of
the hive that they are occupying. The temperature
of the rest of the hive interior is not that different
from the ambient temperature outside the hive. As
such, I find most efforts to insulate and wrap hives
to be a waste of time. If I kept my bees in a climate
colder than USDA plant hardiness zone 4a, where
it typically gets down to about -25F -32C) for
a maximum of a week or two each winter, then I
might view the practice of wrapping or packing
hives with insulation differently. As it is, I have
never wrapped or packed my hives for winter,
and yet, even since the arrival of varroa mites, I
can achieve good overwintering results by simply
focusing on the three key ingredients of winter
survival: strong, healthy colonies; plenty of honey
stores; and dry bees.
Because I have already covered ways to ensure
a strong, populous colony with plenty of honey
stores for winter and I will go into these topics in
even more detail later on), I will focus here on the
issue of moisture within the hive. A secure, water-
proof outer cover and hive bodies that are solid and
tight-fitting are the hives primary defenses against
moisture. Many beekeepers will use a rock or brick
to weigh down the outer cover so that strong winter
winds will not pry the cover loose, flinging it aside
and allowing precipitation to enter. This usually
find brood in your honey supers, it is a healthy
thing to allow the queen all the room she requires
to lay her eggs. A gentle way of encouraging the
mother queen to keep her brood confined to the
lower part of the hive, without forcing her by using
a queen excluder, is to start off the honey superingprocess with shallow supers. Because the bees will
be more likely to fill a shallow super with nectar,
rather than eggs, two or three shallows should be
built up upon the colony before any deep honey
supers are used. The relatively large span of sealed
honey provided by several filled and capped shal-
low honey supers acts as a natural queen excluder
and discourages the queen from crossing all that
honey to lay eggs in a distant part of the hive.
Getting back to our hive reversal process: Priorto placing the top hive body, which is chock-full of
bees and honey and still has the inner cover attached
to it, on the bottom board, the bottom of the frames
of the hive body should be scraped clean of all burr
comb. Care must be taken to scrape off burr comb
and brace comb clear down to the wood, since any
wax remaining will act as foundation and provide
the bees with guidance and motivation for rebuild-
ing in the same location. If you find your hive tool is
gouging and peeling off layers of wood while scrap-
ing your equipment clean, your tool may be too
sharp. Dragging the sharply honed end of the hive
tool along a rock or brick a dozen times or so will dull
the edge enough so that, when held at the proper
angle, it will remove wax and debris without strip-
ping off the wood underneath like a planing tool. By
taking the time to thoroughly clean burr comb off
the frames and other areas of the hive early in the
season, a lot of trouble and inconvenience can be
avoided later on. As with the process of cleaning up
dead hives, a significant amount of beeswax can becollected for rendering by scraping burr comb from
the tops and bottoms of the frames into a box before
setting the hive bodies and supers back into place.
This also helps to prevent the crushing of many bees
when repositioning the hive bodies on their stand.
You would be surprised at how much beeswax can
be collected from a hive during such a process.