[tikkay]

I have a very strong hive in a double deep with a fresh Queen from this Spring that I had been planning on reducing to a single deep to try and make some comb honey.
The flow is starting to kick in so yesterday I set out to ready the hive.

What I found was the bottom deep plugged with honey and no brood. Top deep had 6-7 frames of capped brood and very little open brood. The rest was also plugged out with honey and any available cells in brood nest were backfilled. At least a dozen swarm cells were on the brood frames ranging in stages of 2 that were capped, to cups with eggs in them.
Above the excluder is a honey super filled with honey and another super that has 1 frame of drawn comb (filled with honey) and 9 frames of foundation hat they have not touched.

I found the Queen and put her in a nuc with a frame of emerging brood and scraped all the Swarm cells except for the 2 capped ones. I also removed he excluder.
Not knowing what to do next, I closed the hive up to ponder my next move.

It left me wondering if this is a good comb honey candidate considering their lack of comb drawing initiative?

My first thought was to use the swarm cells and brood to start some nucs, but do I want to propagate those characteristics? So, away went the cells.

What next?

 

[JWPalmer]

What next?

You play the hand you dealt yourself. Which characteristics are you trying to avoid? When the bees went into swarm mode, they started filling the brood nest and were no longer interested in drawing out your top super. That is what they do. I would remove the capped super, extract it, and put back on the hive. They may repair and fill drawn comb while waiting for their new queen to emerge and start laying again, but I seriously doubt they will draw out a comb honey super at this point.

 

[tikkay]

Extracting was my thought also. That and an unending supply of drawn comb. Neither are happening in near future.
Should I not have removed the Queen?

 

[JWPalmer]

Removing the queen was good as it most likely prevented an imminent swarm from happening. I would not have destroyed the queen cells and instead made several nucs. Nucs on a flow can get a few frames each drawn in short order once the queen is mated. One other idea would be to put the split with the laying queen (in a full sized box) where the original hive was and fill the box with foundation. Known as a flyback split, it gets comb drawn quickly. Since a flyback is heavy on foragers, you might try setting your comb honey super on it and see what they do.

 

[tikkay]

I checked on things yesterday and the bees are drawing comb in the super so I’m going to leave and let be at this point.
Hopefully there will be a new fresh Queen in a couple of weeks and all will be well. Thanks for suggestions.