Empty Med between two deep bodies

[JRG13]

Brood hatched out and they had all that nice drawn comb to fill up. I think the best thing to do would be extract some of that honey and move honey out of the bottom box and put the empty comb in it's place or new foundation. The bees will draw it quickly (and use some of that honey) and since it's next to the brood frames she'll fill them with eggs quick too. Feeding them might've caused them to backfill the bottom box as well. What's in the medium super now? Just drawn frames or partially drawn? Moving it down might help, but they might just fill it up with nectar too if there's a flow. Like Charlie said, I would put one frame in the middle or the brood and then a pair of flanking frames to start. Check it in a week and I would bet they're fully drawn and filled with eggs/brood/pollen. If it looks good, move the next outer 2 frames of honey and replace with foundation, rinse and repeat til there's just one flanking honey frame on each end. If the Med is just partially drawn with nothing in it, I would think about getting a nother deep ASAP, move the honey up if you don't want to extract or can't keep the frames somewhere and start checkerboarding that bottom box. You need to help them open up that brood nest now, just throwing the medium on top might not do it but I would really encourage them to expand the lower box as brood than rely on the medium being placed above it.

[Daniel Y]

I was feeding but no way did all that honey come from sugar water. They where foraging like mad but I was not certain if it was gathering nectar or water. it was hot there for a couple of weeks. Of the entire two week period I think I had sugar water on for 5 days.

At any rate I ended up setting up a third deep body and spaced that new empty frames through both teh bottom and now the new second deep. I left them the now third deep that is full of honey as that is their winter stores unless they can fill this new deep. If they do I will remove the upper deep and extract that honey.

But for now this step addresses a few issue.

1. gives them some room
2. gets an additional 10 frames drawn so I have them in the future if I face this sort of problem again. limited resources makes it hard to problem solve.
3. Allows me to split the hive if I choose to later and have a deep body to start that split in.

I kept the brood central to the hive and a bit to the west since that seemed to be where they had it in the lower deep. It just goes up rather than sideways now so it depends on just how splitting is defined. I tend to think in three dimensions so keeping brood together can mean the frames are above and below each other. side by side or in front and back.

Time will tell if this was a good move.