Adding a super - Question

[BigRog]

C3 is a very full hive as you can see in this picture (taken at Beemaster central the day before I took the girls for their road trip).



John gave me a extra deep super and I just got finished assembling 10 frames and foundation (This stuff smells great!) and would like to add it tomorrow to give them more room. There seems to be a extra 3/4" of space in the super. Right now there is a lot of brood in the upper super and more honey in the lower. I was thinking of switching upper and lower and putting the empty super on top. Would this be the best way to do it? Any help? The hive has a beard on it like in the picture and it's 10:30 pm. I would like to prevent a swarm if that is even possible.

Thanks

[golfpsycho]

Big Rog.. adding room is hardly ever a mistake with a strong colony.  There are lots of ways to address the situation if they run out of time.. very few ways to fix it if half of them fly away.  Give them the room... see what happens.  If they start drawing wax.. no worries.  If they don't occupy the super, pull it back off when it cools off.  Give em a chance to do their thing.  They know alot more about weather, nectar gathering, utilizing space, then we ever will.

As far as reversing boxes.. for me.. it's late for that kind of manipulation.  The weather here has changed.. and even I can feel winter coming. (you know your weather better than me.  It's coming fast enough that I put syrup on my colonys to top them off today.  I think it's pretty clear they aren't gathering anything.  They pulled a half gallon each of 2:1 in about 8 hours.  Me thinks it will be a long cold one on the wasatch this year.

[Anonymous]

BigRog,

Are you saying that there is no brood in the lower super at all? If you are then I would suggest you go ahead and switch the supers in order to put the brood closer to the hive bodies,

As for the 3/4 inch extra space in the new super, you need to try to evenly space the frames in the super when you install it. The bees will quickly fill up the spaces between the frames and you'll wonder where the space went to. If the box was built with no extra space in it, once the bees applied some propolis to the frames you would have a devil of a time removing any of the frames.