Lloyd Spear makes lots of good points.

However, there is a down side to confining the queen to the bottom super
during heavy nectar flows, such as we get in MT on a good year -- although
that's not been a problem last few years.

When the queen is confined to a bottom box with 9 or even 10 frames, under
conditions of a heavy flow, the forager bees will deposit nectar in any
open cell in the bottom box, rushing back to the field to get more.  At
night the workers move the temp stores up.  But, this causes the queen to
cease or reduce laying.  Thus, the brood nest begins to rapidly shrink -
every cell that frees up with an emergent adult gets filled with nectar,
and the queen is taking a vacation.  We've also seen bees tear down
partially drawn comb in other parts of the hive and apparently reuse to wax
for capping -- essentially moving it from incomplete cells and reusing to
finish off cells with ripened nectar/honey.

We've seen this in hundreds of hives, measured it.  Real surprise to us
when we first saw.

Jerry

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