There's probably a lot of starting over in a bee's life. In the meantime, they'll be busy sallying forth on foraging missions, bringing nectar and pollen back to the hives, cleaning cells in the comb for new bee eggs, feeding their newly hatched sisters, attending to their queen's every need, grooming each other, standing guard and, of course, filling the combs with honey. The bee's list of duties changes as it gets older, but if it's not specifically assigned to a project at the moment, it will roam the comb until it finds something to do. Each hive consists of two deep boxes, similar to file cabinet drawers. This is where the colony goes about its queenly business and collects honey it gets to keep for the winter.
Supers are shallower boxes, sort of like sock drawers in comparison to the deeper boxes downstairs.
It is in these supers that the bees make the honey that Ike gets to keep, filter, bottle, label, and sell. The taller the hive, the more supers are being stacked, the more productive the bees are being. And all that whacking and cracking that Ike performs clears the clustering bees from the super the bees are currently working on. That way he can peer inside at the nine frames where the bees are building up comb and filling honey. As a super begins to look crowded, the space between the frames getting filled up with comb, Ike adds another super on top, tenderly brushing away the bees from the edge with his gloved fingertips so they don't get mashed under the heavy weight of the new storey their colony has just received.