After their first week, our third hive has grown enough to need a new hive body and frames. The same hive managed to consume a quart of sugar water in the last day. The other two hives have a bit of catching up to do, but they seem to be quite active. Hopefully by next weekend they'll be ready for another hive body.
Although the starter kits we ordered from the Wake County Beekeeper Association came with a single hive body and a shallow super, we decided to use a second hive body on each hive. This builds a larger (stronger) hive and will hopefully aid in swarm prevention next year when we will reverse the order of the hive bodies to "trick" the bees into thinking they have more room.
In addition to the extra hive bodies, we also picked up a few "medium" sized supers. These are just tall enough to fit over a quart jar when feeding the bees sugar water from the top. Next year we'll use them to collect extra honey for ourselves. Each medium super should hold around 35 pounds of honey when they're full, so if we're lucky we'll get a decent amount.
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