Super order?

[LFortune45]

A friend recently told me I should put new,undrawn supers under drawn or partially filled supers rather than on top like I have been doing.  I thought the bees worked up and the top was the best place.   What do y'all think of this and does it matter if using drawn comb from extracting?  Thanks in advance.

[Brian D. Bray]

Bees naturally work down.  In the wild (which is duplicated with TBH's) they start at the top and build comb down until they  hit the bottom of the cavity they haven chosen to occupy--then they swarm when that's full thereby making room for further growth.

Putting the new super between previous ones uses this tendency to work downward to the beekeepers advantage on one hand and motivates the bees to fill in the newly created gap on the other.  In a manabed hive the bees never hit the bottom of their cavity because the beekeeper keeps enlarging it.

That's the basic logic behind the advice you were given and it is accurate.

[thomashton]

I too have seen that bees will draw and fill a super faster if not put on top. This year I put on a super and they were reluctant to fill it. After two weeks I put it under a full one and it filled right up.

Could have saved two weeks (assuming the flow was consistent), had I followed the supering advice in "Keeping Bees" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0913589195/sr=8-1/qid=1154443497/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-9079353-7305756?ie=UTF8 by John Vivian. He recommends this practice.