I have a question about brood and honey storage with my current hive. My goal is they store more honey in the supers than they do in the brood chambers.
I my hive consists of two-deeps and two-supers.
Level 1 (first deep on the bottom with the door) has brood, some honey, and of course Pollen on the end frames.
Level 2 (second deep) has very little brood but a lot of honey.
Level 3 (first super) comb has been drawn out nicely and is slowly becoming full.
Level 4 (second super) I added it 4-weeks ago, they still havn't drawn anything (they dont need to).
I decided to swap Level 2 with Level 1. This decision holds the rationale that, the more brood away from the door will cause more honey to be stored up higher on level 3. Also I put a drawn-out empty frame in the level 2 deep which is now near the door. It should be full of eggs shortly.
a summary of my rationale is the bees are used to brood in level 1 and store honey level 2. Now they've been swapped the bees will still go to level 2 to store honey but then move to level 3 since level 2 has more brood in it. I hope this makes sense.
Thoughts, opinions, suggestions?
what they were doing is the way they usually do it. brood below, honey above. what you did probably won't hurt anything, but i'm wondering if you have enough brood space. also, by winter, you want honey above and around the brood, not below it.
what i would do is pull some of those deep frames that are full of honey and replace them with empty frames. save the honey frames to feed back later if you need to. from your description, i'd pull at least 4 from the middle of that bottom box. let the bees move back down and fill again above them as they naturally want to do.
I had a hive become "honey bound" last year with the upper deep almost all honey and no place for Her Majesty to lay. I pulled 3 frames and froze them and replaced them with foundation. I was glad I did because I ended up feeding them back in March when they ran out of honey because of an unusually cold winter we had.