Mark's friend Dennis looked at my first honey extraction post and gently asked Mark, "Do you all use nine frame supers or ten frame supers?"  The honest truth is that I'd read about nine frame supers, but hadn't quite wrapped my head around them.

A quick search of the internet explained that a nine frame super is quite simple --- you remove one frame from each honey super and space the remaining frames a little further apart.  The bees will extend the wax out further from the frame, making the frame much easier to uncap during extraction.  As an added bonus, some websites suggest that nine frame supers actually hold more honey than ten frame supers since you lose less room between frames.

When I was harvesting honey last week, I turned all of our ten frame supers into nine frame supers, which had the added bonus of providing me with an extra super full of frames to pop onto the third hive.  Some people buy special tools to let them space nine frames apart evenly, but I just spaced the frames by eye.  I guess we'll see how the nine frame supers do on our next honey harvest day.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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