Bees honey storage pattern?

[dalewills]

Just wondering if any of your gurus out there can inform me on the pattern in which bees fill their hive. Do they storage honey from the top down or the bottom up?


Cheers

Dale

[iddee]

Imagine a barrel upside down full of honey that won't fall out. Then push a basketball up into the middle of it until the bottom of the ball is even with the bottom of the honey. That is how the hive looks. It stays that way. When honey comes in, the ball goes down. When the honey is used, the ball goes up. The ball is the brood chamber.

[texanbelchers]

Nice analogy.  Most descriptions don't explain the 3D nature of it.

Pollen is stored between the brood and honey.

[Honeycomb king]

Depending on the time of year, season, nectar flow volume, floral source, temperature etc.the bees may fill the outside frames before they fill the frames closer to the brood. Is that what your question is asking or do you mean on each frame? In which case they tend to fill from the top of the frame down, or from centre outish again depends on variables above.
Why the question?

[Michael Bush]

When they move into a tree they go to the top of the cavity and build a brood nest.  Then as they get honey they store it overhead and below the brood nest they keep building comb.  Eventually the brood nest is at the bottom and the honey is overhead.  In a tree there is only one way to go, and that is down.

In a typically managed Langstroth hive the colony starts out in one box and fills it.  The beekeeper then adds empty space over head and there is no comb there.  The bees don't like empty space overhead so they go draw comb in the box and, in keeping with their desire to store honey over the brood nest they fill it with honey.  This is repeated until the season is over.

In both scenarios honey is stored overhead.  But in the first the honey starts at the top and works its way down.  In the second it is filled in the order that the empty supers are added.  If they are added to the top then they fill them from just over the brood nest to whatever the last box is.  If they are undersupered (new empty super put under the drawn full supers) then it will be the same order as the tree.

The bees seem to have no preference other than to fill space over the brood nest with honey.