Hi Bill, I'm not an expert on this but my experience is that you should
use a queen excluder between your two bottom brood supers and the honey
supers that go on top. Some only use one brood chamber and put the
excluder between it and subsequent honey supers. Others do not use
excluders at all. My experience is that using two supers helps prevent
swarming. If i didn't use an excluder i got brood in with the honey. I
prefer clean honey so I always use excluders. Hope this helps. By the way
I'am a beginner, this is my third year, I have three hives, all of them
very active. One is six supers high. I plan to extract this weekend.
Cheers, Doug Henry, Lockport, Manitoba.
 
On Tue, 30 Jul 1996, Bill Painter wrote:
 
>
> I checked my hives yesterday.  I have one with three supers and one with
> one.  The one with three had caped about 2/3 down on most of the frames some
> more some less on the top super.  on the next super down there was brood
> that took up about 1/3 of the center of the frames about half caped half in
> the lava stage.  I did not look at the last super figuring that it had about
> the same situation as the second.
>
> Is this "normal"  should I wait till the brood is hatched or just until they
> are caped?  Did I do something wrong to encourage this?
>