Went into my hive Saterday. Opened drone brood no sign of varroa in any that I opened (75-100 cells)I using the FGMO fogging and cords. Seen lots of bees My queen has moved up into the medium supper I'm using as a second hive body. The lower brood box was full of brood about 2 weeks ago. Know the medium super was full of brood. Will the queen go back down into the lower brood box? The lower brood box was either hatching out or already hatched out. Several frames were empty.
As long as there is no danger of cold temps I would change the boxes around. The queen will move on her own back down but is sometimes reluctent to do so. Do not flip boxes to soon in spring if disrupting the brood pattern endangers chilling the brood.
Those are the little things that many miss and may miss maximizing honey efforts.
Note: (KNOW WHAT YOUR DOING-You could really screw things up) I say this because its also good to make sure the queen is laying in the bottom box come fall. That way the cluster will move up thruoghout the winter. Changing boxes achieves this but you run the risk if your timing is off and they can't rearrange the honey stores properly.
Some say she will not. My experience is she will go where she can find empty cells. She's slow to move up or down from the box she's in, but she will find what she can to lay in. The ones who believe she will not move down are very big on reversing alll the time. If you wish to do this, do it when the bottom box has space for brood and the top one is mostly full of brood or honey.
If the botom box doesn' have room for brood because it's full of honey, it doesn't do much good to reverse.
Are you mixing two deeps and a medium for a brood chamber? I wouldn't. I would start trying to swap out the deeps for more mediums if you want to use mediums or swap out the medium for deeps. You'll want to be able to rearrange things sometimes and you can't interchange frames when you mix depths in the brood area.
You can move whatever out of the brood area if you make sure you don't move the queen above the queen excluder The best method for this is to find her and set her frame in a box off to the side for the moment. Then put all of the frames that are all honey in another box and add frames of brood to the box with the queen until you have sorted out the two deep boxes you have into to new deep boxes. You now have a box of honey and a box of brood. If you have left over frames of honey, put them on the outside of the brood. Preferable frames with more pollen. If you have left over brood, put emerging brood without a queen in with the honey. Put all of this above the queen excluder and add a box of medium to the brood area. Later you can try to isolate the queen in the medium boxes and move the deep box above the excluder and add another medium box to the brood chamber.
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