Hello all,
 
You may remember my experience last week with the 40+ beestings and
subsequent reaction.  You may also remember that I have publicly advocated
using an entrance in the upper part of a stack of supers on a hive, saying
that my hives seemed to be producing MEGA honey with this arrangement.  The
two facts are related.
 
I went back to that unbelievably violent hive to finish the job of removing
the last three supers of honey.  This time I used much smoke and
investigated first.  This is what I found.  I had a stack of 9 supers on
this hive.  I removed 5 of the supers before the attack. I checked out the
remaining supers before attempting to remove them and guess what I found.  
A swarm had moved in through the upper opening in the hive.  I didn't have
this problem in any of the other hives with upper vents.   Anyway they had
whole frames of brood in these supers.  When I had tried to bee-go them out
they were trying to stay with their brood.  That's why they were so
violent.   
In the lower section of the hive my queen that I had introduced this past 
spring to the original hive was laying away as well.  With the barrier of 
honey and a queen excluder the queens were happy to stay in the same hive 
together.  This explains the high productivity of this hive.  It was a 2
queener!
 
I've split them up and now have two hives but I have to get the queen in
the supers to start laying in a deep body and move these bees out of those
supers before winter or those supers will be home all winter.  I want to
get them back into honey super duty.  Any tricks or easy methods for moving
the bees into deep hive bodies?  I'll almost certainly have to feed them
for winter stores.  Think the super frames that have had such intense brood
duty will be suitable for honey super duty?  I know they'll be wax moth
magnets but I plan to use PDB this year.
 
Ted Wout
Red Oak, TX, USA