Honey bound???

When you do a full hive inspection you must asses the space overall within the hive. As a dearth approaches an excess of honey in the brood chamber is not a bad thing. The queen slows laying during a dearth, and may even stop all together. This surplus will help them through the dearth.

All the talk of honey bound hives as with anything tends to fuel a panic reaction. Like during the McCarthy era when people were seeing Comies everywhere. Our self imposed paranoia tends to make us suspicious. In turn we overreact! Just because the bees are storing honey in the brood chamber does not mean you are in danger of being honey bound, in fact it is quite normal. if there is a super on and the bees are not filling it, but putting honey in the brood chamber it is generally because that is where they need it. backfilling generally occurs when the bees are bringing in great volumes of nectar and have no other place to store it. in which case they generally realize they are outgrowing the hive, and swarm.

If you think there are plenty of frames filled with honey you could replace one or two with empty comb or even new foundation. I am a first year beekeeper also, and I did this with one of my hives. I had observed almost zero empty cells in the brood area and even noticed all the empty cells among the emerging brood were being filled with nectar. The areas of young brood and eggs were small and limited. I removed two frames full of nectar and replaced them with frames of new foundation. I placed the new frames near the middle of the brood nest with a frame of capped brood between them. I froze the full frames of nectar to use later as feed for a needy hive. The bees started drawing out comb on the new foundation within a few days and the queen was laying in the cells as fast as they could build them. Now I have a reestablished brood area full of brood and two extra frames of honey and drawn comb to use later. It shouldn't hurt anything to try this, even if you just do one frame.