[cheetahbee]

Dear all,

I just joined this forum, and I hope to learn a lot.
I have four strong hives and a strong honey flow. Each has two full-depth brood boxes. I added an ideal-sized super with drawn comb to the top of each, but instead of filling them, the bees are back-filling the brood frames with honey, depriving the queens of room to lay. Is there any reason why they started doing this (I haven't had the problem before in my 6 years of beekeeping), and is there any way of discouraging it?

A second thing I'm wondering about: My bees have always been very slow to cap their honey- so slow, that I end up leaving an excess over winter because if they do end up capping it eventually, it's already too cold to open them up and extract. I live in a high-ish altitude climate, with a late-summer honey flow, and summer weather often ends rather rapidly here.

Btw, I live in the Southern Hemisphere, hence the strong February honey flow!

 

[cheetahbee]

Sorry, I forgot to mention that I am aware that the weather does affect how quickly they cap honey, but even in hot dry summers, they are still slower than what I've heard from other people and what I've read in books. Is there a genetic factor in their ability to produce wax?

 

[Gypsi]

it's probably the flow slows down on late capping, it takes a lot of nectar to make wax. By the same token you don't want to feed syrup when they are making honey. if you can tip the frame and the honey doesn't try to spill out, it's probably thick enough to extract. And using supers is helpful for the bees organizational system. We have a member in your area - @amandabee