If spring is the awakening, summer is the triumph. This is what all the preparation was for. This is the season the bees have been building toward since the queen laid her first egg in February. The colony is at peak strength — fifty, sixty, even eighty thousand individuals working in perfect synchrony. The brood nest spans multiple boxes. The foragers work from dawn until dusk, making ten or more trips per day, visiting thousands of flowers, returning with legs heavy with pollen and crops full of nectar.
The hive hums with productivity. Walk past on a July afternoon and you can hear it from twenty feet away — a deep, contented drone that speaks of abundance, of surplus, of a superorganism operating at full capacity.
This is the season of plenty. And it is, paradoxically, a season that requires your vigilance.
A strong summer colony is a magnificent thing. Thirty to forty thousand bees cover the brood frames. Foragers stream in and out of the entrance in an unbroken line. The honey supers — those boxes you added in late spring — are filling with capped honey at a rate that would astonish you if you weighed the hive weekly.
A single frame of capped honey weighs about six to eight pounds. A medium super holds ten frames. Do the math: a strong colony can fill a super in a week during a good nectar flow. That's sixty to eighty pounds of honey being processed, dehydrated, and capped in seven days.
Your job in summer is primarily one of space management. The bees need room — room to store nectar, room to ripen it into honey, room to cap and cure it. If you don't provide that room, they will backfill the brood nest (storing honey where the queen needs to lay), and that triggers swarm preparations even in mid-summer.
Watch the supers. When seven or eight frames are being drawn or filled, add another box. Stay ahead of them. The worst thing you can do in summer is run out of space.
The nectar flow is not a single event but a series of blooms, overlapping and sequential, that provide forage from late spring through early fall. In many regions, there are multiple flows:
Early flow (May-June): Fruit trees, black locust, tulip poplar, clover. This is often the strongest flow of the year.
Mid-summer gap (July): A dearth period in many areas when spring blooms have faded and fall bloomers haven't yet begun. This can be a risky time.
Late flow (August-September): Goldenrod, aster, knotweed, sumac. A second wave that helps bees build winter stores.
Your local flow is local. What happens in Vermont differs radically from what happens in Georgia or California. Learn your area's bloom calendar. Talk to experienced beekeepers. Keep records year to year. Over time, you'll develop an intuitive sense of when flows begin and end, and that knowledge will guide your management.
Let's be specific about this, because timing matters.
When to add: When 7-8 frames in the current super have drawn comb or are being actively worked. Do not wait until all ten frames are capped. By then, you're late, and the bees may have already begun backfilling the brood nest.
Where to add: On top. Always on top. The bees work upward, filling boxes from bottom to top. Don't try to be clever and insert an empty super between two full ones — it confuses the bees and disrupts their natural pattern.
Foundation or foundationless? Both work. Foundation speeds things up (the bees have less wax to draw), but foundationless produces beautiful, natural comb. If you use foundationless frames in a super, alternate them with drawn comb to provide a guide.
How many to add at once? One is standard. Two if you're in the middle of a heavy flow and the colony is enormous. Don't add three — that's too much space for the bees to defend and temperature-regulate.
Around July in many regions, something strange happens: the nectar flow stops. Spring bloomers have faded. Summer heat has stressed the plants. And the late-summer bloomers haven't yet begun.
This is the mid-summer dearth, and it catches many new beekeepers by surprise. Suddenly, after weeks of abundance, the bees have nothing to forage. Returning foragers come back empty. The hive's mood shifts — they become more defensive, more prone to stinging, more likely to investigate you as a potential threat.
And worst of all, they start looking for alternative food sources. That means robbing.
Robbing is when bees from one colony attack another colony to steal its honey. It happens most often during dearths when forage is scarce and strong colonies get desperate. The robbers identify a weak hive — one with a small population, a failing queen, or an entrance too large to defend — and launch an assault.
You'll know robbing when you see it. The entrance becomes a battlefield: bees grappling, stinging, tumbling to the ground. Robbers dart in and out, frantic and aggressive. The defenders fight back, but if they're outnumbered, they lose. Within hours, the hive can be emptied of all its honey stores.
Prevention is everything:
While you're watching the supers fill with honey, something else is building inside the brood nest: Varroa mite populations.
Remember the mite's lifecycle. Each female mite enters a brood cell, reproduces, and sends her daughters out to infest new cells. With peak brood production in summer, mite populations can double every 3-4 weeks. A manageable infestation in May becomes a crisis by August.
Test your mite levels at least once in mid-summer — preferably in July. Use an alcohol wash or sugar shake to get an accurate count. If you're over 3% (3 mites per 100 bees), treat immediately. Don't wait. Mites in summer become viruses in fall, and viruses kill winter bees.
Bees regulate hive temperature by fanning their wings, evaporating water, and creating airflow. On extremely hot days (90°F+), you may see bearding — a cluster of bees hanging outside the entrance, looking for all the world like they're about to swarm. They're not. They're just hot.
You can help by ensuring good ventilation. Prop up the inner cover slightly with popsicle sticks to create a top vent. Make sure the entrance is fully open. Consider adding a screened bottom board if you don't have one already.
But don't overthink it. Bees have been surviving summer heat for ages. Your intervention is rarely necessary.
"A beekeeper's summer work is nine parts watching and one part acting. The bees know their business. We are merely stewards of space and guardians against mites."
— The Modern Apiarist, 1923