I keep about a dozen colonies in San Francisco and nearby areas on the
coast. I use double deeps for brood chambers. (Keeping bees in such an
urban area I want to give the queen plenty of room as one way of
discouraging swarming.) Over the course of our typically mild winter,
however, several of my colonies have completely filled the top brood
chamber with honey, leaving no room for the queen to move up and lay.
 
Several beekeepers I know deal with this problem by just extracting the
honey and putting the empty frames back on the hive for the queen to lay
in. I really don't want to go to the hassle of extracting those frames,
especially in this cool time of year. Also, the honey in the plugged
frames was gathered when I was treating with Apistan and Terramycin, so
it would not be useful for human consumption.
 
Any suggestions on approaches to this problem? One other bit of
information: I want to do some splits this year and it would be useful
to solve the plugged frame problem in a way that might fit in with my
plans to make splits.
 
I thought about replacing several of the honey-plugged frames with
foundation to give the bees something to work on and maybe discourage
them a little from swarming. But then I have to do something with the
frames of honey I remove.
 
Another beekeeper suggested that perhaps I could place the honey-filled
box on the bottom underneath the active brood box, using a cappings
scratcher to expose the honey in the plugged frames. Then I could place
a deep super of foundation on the very top. In that arrangement, the
bees might feed on the honey from the bottom box and draw out the comb
in the top box. That way I could use the drawn comb in the new box when
I make my splits in April. Would that work?
 
Tom Chester