I was talking to my father yesterday, and he asked me whether there were any bees in the first super (i.e. brood box). What he meant was this--I have four supers. Each super is merely a box with frames inside. I have 4 boxes that are stacked up, with a bottom and a lid. That is the beehive.
I didn't know the answer. The question is relevant because bees have a tendency to migrate up into a hive, going from the bottom to the top. In pursuit of the honey they have stored, they start elevating the area where they make babies, and you may end up with an empty box at the bottom, which is an inefficient way to house your bees.
The reason I didn't know the answer is because it has been a long time since I actually took all the boxes apart and looked at the bottom super. So I decided to do that. Put on the veil, started up the smoker, wearing gloves. For some strange reason a cloud of bees encircled the hive. There were a lot of agitated bees. I smoked the heck out of them. I had never seen them do that. They weren't super aggressive, they weren't trying to attack me, they were just agitated.
Killed a couple of hive beetles taking off the top. Then started pulling off the supers one by one. When you don't take your hive apart, you will get "bridge comb" between supers. That is, the bees will make comb between the boxes and when you pull them apart, you end up breaking that bridge comb. So I saw rather large larvae that were exposed as I pulled boxes off. It's ok, there are plenty more from where they came from, and those at the bottom of frames are usually worthless drones.
End of the story is that yes, there were plenty of bees in the bottom super, and no, I didn't get stung, and when I put it altogether the cloud of bees went into the hive and disappeared like magic, like I had blown a whistle and they obeyed on command. There are starting to be a good number of bees in the top super, so that is where they will (hopefully) store the honey that I will harvest. We shall see.
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