lots of honey in brood box

[woodmann98]

i have 5 colonies, two of them 12 frames or more of honey in a double brood boxs, and nothing in my honey super. wondering if this is okay? i do have a queen excluder on. they are 10 weeks old.

[Ben Brewcat]

Take out the excluders. The queen is loathe to cross capped honey anyways.

[honeyman46408]

"anyways" but NOT always

[Moonshae]

If your flow ends soon, they will likely need all those stores to make it through the summer to the fall flows. If your flow is already over, they aren't going to spend the energy drawing comb they don't need for storage. If there's nothing coming in, they need to rely on the stores they have to survive until they can build up for winter.

[Bee Draggle]

The bees will need that honey stored in the brood boxes to make through lean times when there is no nectar coming in. When they run out of room in the brood boxes, they will begin storing nectar in the honey supers provided you still have a good honey flow in progress.