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Hive check
This must get the record for being our tallest hive. It consists of a super and brood box at the bottom. This was the original hive. Then on top of it is the brood box from another hive that went queenless a couple of months ago. The two hives were merged to create on super hive which we planned to split again. However, on checking the top brood box yesterday, we found no queen cells in it so we decided to keep it together as one big hive and added a queen excluder and super to the top to collect honey. My expectation is that this hive will swarm so I hope we are around to capture it.
We checked the other two hives on our Sunniside apiary yesterday aswell and found a similar story. We had placed brood boxes on them in the expectation we could split them once queen cells were found. Since we found none (we think they may be in the bottom brood box), we have again decided to leave the hives as large units and added supers to them to let us harvest honey over the summer. Again, we still expect them to produce swarms.
We have lots of people asking us for honey at the moment but we don't expect to start cropping until the end of June. If sales are anything like last year, we expect to be out of honey by December.
Source: http://self-sufficientinsuburbia.blogspot.com/2014/05/hive-check.html
When I had my hives in Tasmania (Australia), a few years ago, I had to stand on the back of my flat tray truck to lift the Honey supers off. The hives were over 6 and a half feet high, with a young Italian Queen. Now that’s a tall Bee hive and a healthy one too.