> So what would you do, come spring, to
> reclaim the supers for their normal use and get the bees back down into the
> deeps?


I overwinter with a single deep and 3-4 medium supers.

During the spring build up I encourage the upward expansion of the broodnest by opening up the nest with frames of empty comb and pyramiding brood up to the next unused box.

My goal is to get broodnest expansion to the top of the top box, and when that is achieved I’ll shake the queen down into the empty bottom deep below an excluder to start a new nest there.

It is necessary to go back a week later and deal with the emergency cells that are sometimes made in the supers.  These are used to make small splits or culled if not needed.

As the brood emerges above the excluders it is replaced with the new honey crop.

This has been an effective method for swarm prevention with the side benefit yielding a batch of newly mated queens in small nucs.

There is some lifting involved with this approach but boxes of brood are not as heavy as boxes of honey.

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