Nadiring vs Supering

Nadiring consists of adding supers at the bottom of the hive, instead of at the top, as is usually done with supers.
Giles Denis, from France, does both, adding one supper at the top, and others at the bottom.
Here is a great post about this from John on an online Warre beekeeping forum:

>Have you thought about top supering a portion of your hives so as to split test your apiary?

That's what I did last year, sort of. I top-supered two of my 11 hives. These hives gave me 7 of the 11 boxes of honey I harvested. Mind you, they were two of my strongest hives. The lower yield of a nadired hive vs a topsupered hive is just simple mathematics. Since the bees will only store honey above and to the sides
of the broodnest, then brood must hatch and vacate cells in order for the bees to have room for honey. As the bees will only hatch out at the rate at which a queen can lay, the it follows that new storage room becomes available for only a kilogram or so of honey per day. With top-supering, bees will store 20 lbs + of honey daily in a hive during the peak of the clover/alfalfa flow, at least here in Alberta.

So the question that immediately comes up is "Why, then wouldn't you top super?" The answer to that question is crucial, in my opinion, to understanding how bees change focus as the season progresses in order to ensure their survival over the long dark cold winter.

Take care-
John