I didn't want to put my supers away wet, so I decided to stack them and let the bees do the job of cleaning them. The stack had a cover and had a reduced entrance. The bottom board was a double screen with a small adjustable entry. One of the supers had some unripe honey that I didn't extract. I had removed this super to reduce a hive down to 2 deeps and a medium. The first thing I noticed was that only bees from a single hive were allowed to enter by the other bees around the entrance. Wasps and bees from other hives were discouraged. It seems that with the reduced entrance the war was quickly over and the robbing proceeded in an orderly fashion. The robbers were from one of my hives. The hive had been reduced to 2 deeps with the removal of the extracted super. Last night, day 2, I noticed 1000's of bees on the landing board and the front of the hive. More than I had ever seen before even of hot humid nights. This hive is not my strongest. It had never had more bees than my strongest hive outside the entrance until now. No such mass of bees occurred on day 1 of the clean up. My question is why so many bee outside now? The weather is cool and dry. I'm assuming the honey that was robbed does not need much evaporation so ventilation should not be a major issue. My quess is that the hive had run out of space and the bees might be loaded and waiting for unloading room. I added one of the extracted supers just in case it was a space problem. However, this is what I was trying to avoid when I didn't replace the super originally. Does anyone have any insights? Am I courting disaster with this approach? Thanks, Jim Moore [log in to unmask]