No room at the inn

[bushman1872]

Right I have a small problem which I'm hoping has a remedy. I have 2 hives with 14x12 brood bodies. During the first lot of bad weather in april they swarmed. They both had queens which took their sweet time to start laying. In the meantime we got some goof weather and despite having a super on their went bannanas and filled every available space with pollen and honey. No the new queens have carved some space to lay but not enough one hive contained around 10 well developed queen cells, there is just no space. Is there any way of getting them to move uncapped stores upstairs to give her space to lay. As a stop gap measure I have put a national brood body on
top of the 14x12.

 

[newportbuzz]

you can encourage the bees to move the honey/stores by
1 scraping the cappings
2 moving the clogged frame into the broodnest(carefully).
3 extracting them.
4 replacing with some foundation.

option 2 is quite risky can easliy make things worse.

 

[mbc]

I tend to think they know what they're doing and usually manage their nest quite nicely without interference but this situation can be put out of kilter if they've been overfed. Sometimes giving them a super of drawn comb, preferably wet (just been extracted)can give them immediate access to somewhere to put excess honey from the brood nest.
If they've swarmed and want to swarm again already, I would also consider requeening with a less swarmy strain.

 

[SimonB]

Just lost a small swarm today (managed to catch it) due to honey bound brood nest - exactly the same situation as you, they are ignoring the super (all foundation unfortunately). I had moved some frames with laying space from the other hive but obviously not enough. I had hoped to inspect during the week but either no time or bad weather. I have scraped some cappings today to encourage them to move it up, but they don't seem inclined to draw foundation. Obviously a lot few bees now, but hope to reunite the swarm asap.