[JasonERD]

One of my hives was raising a new queen (on purpose, we made a split) and while they were doing that the bees collected quite a bit of nectar and pollen. They have 4 boxes of 8 frame medium supers. When I went through the hive to see how she was doing, I noticed that almost all of the brood is in the top box, there are 2 frames of mostly capped honey, in the next box it is almost all nectar, a little capped, in the next box there is another few frames of brood and the rest is nectar and capped honey. The bottom box is full of pollen except for the middle 4 frames. Here there are cells that are either empty or have small amounts of pollen or nectar.

They haven't made any queen cells, but she does look a little nectar/honey bound. (I have had a hive that had a laying queen for 2 weeks make swarm cells on me, because there wasn't much empty room for the queen to lay)

Should I reconfigure some of the hive, or let them take care of it?

If I was to rearrange things, I was thinking of moving the frames of brood closer together, and maybe extracting a couple of frames to give her more room... There is a little flow still on, and I think they still have plenty of stores, but they aren't pulling much new wax. If I were to move the brood nest, would I put it above or below the bottom box (full of pollen)?

thank you

 

[BernhardHeuvel]

I would reconfigure all the brood combs into one box, second from the bottom. It is good to have the broodnest compact. The bees backfill the broodnest on purpose with nectar and pollen. They eat the nectar and pollen, clean the cells and the queen lays eggs into the emptied cells. At a slow pace.

If you would extract the combs, you would take away the brood food. The bees need to take care of the brood for a long time, one month, without them being able to forage. Also the suddenly emptied cells maybe get cleaned and eggs in it, but where does the food for all the brood will come from?

So don't push them too hard, they should grow slowly but steady. On their own food they do the best.