Beekeeping is full of regional or temporal words, and one of them is 'super'. Also known as a 'shallow' and sometimes by the more lengthy 'honey super' it is simply a box that is placed in a superior position, relative to the brood nest, Super stems from the Latin word for 'over'. The most common question we have about supers is 'why have them at all', and by extension 'why a use smaller/shallow frame?' There are four reasons; two important ones are not immediately obvious. The first has to do with the duration of the flow. In regions where the nectar flow is short the bees don't have time to draw, fill, and, importantly, cap and seal a big area of deep wax combs. The honey sealed away will have a low water content and good keeping qualities, but that in the open cells will absorb moisture from the air. If we have to extract honey from frames containing such, partially sealed, comb we risk mixing the two portions, increasing the water content of the honey and damaging our produce. By reducing the depth (size) of the frame containing the comb we improve our chance of being able to separate sealed and unsealed comb before we extract. The second reason for choosing 'shallow' frames to go in the super has to do with our extraction method. (continued...)