Queen in super?

[buzz]

Why does the queen go into the super? Will she move back down? She's laid a bunch of eggs up there and I don't want any eggs in the honey.

[Anonymous]

Buzz,

Queens always have a tendency to move up in the hive to lay eggs. As long as there is room above her to do so. The only way this is prevented is if you have a queen excluder on top of the hive bodies, or the workers fill the cells above her with nectar before she can get in there to lay eggs.

If you force her into the lower hive bodies now and put a queen excluder on top of them between the hive bodies and the supers, the brood that is in the supers will hatch out and the workers will fill the cells with nectar. Before you do this make sure that the queen has open cells in the lower hive bodies to lay in and that the queen is in fact in the bottom.

If you leave everything the way it is, the queen will eventually stop laying in the supers as it gets closer to fall and the workers will force her down below by filling every cell in the supers with nectar and in turn processed honey. You will just have to be patient until this happens and you get the opportunity to remove the honey.

Since I don't use any queen excluders I go through this every year and just wait for the queen to move below. Meanwhile I just extract the capped honey from the frames that don't have any brood in them. Once I remove the frames with capped honey from beside the frames with brood in them, I replace these frames with frames that are completely filled with nectar or partially capped honey so that the queen can't expand her egg laying area in the supers. Note that once the workers fill up the cells surrounding the brood with nectar the queen has no option but to move lower to lay her eggs.

[golfpsycho]

Another thing you can do, is reverse the brood boxes.   I reverse mine as the situation warrants in the spring and early summer.  That way, she is filling the bottom box and as she moves up, the emerging brood is making room again.  Weeks later the process is repeated, and then we're off to the races.  It helps retard swarming, keeps the queen down without hindering the bees efforts to store honey past an excluder.  And I agree with Carbide about queens moving up.  They move up easily but the bees have to twist her arm to go back to the basement, so I help them.  George Imrie has alot to say about reversing brood boxes and swarm prevention, as well as supering.  He's a crusty old bird, but he's been doing it a long time.  Look up his pink pages.