Brood in a super, again.

The bees will ignore empty frames which are above an excluder if there is no comb in them. I put a super on Hive D earlier this year but then took the excluder away then the bees weren't using the super. Now they are using it - for brood rearing. This is inconvenient because I hoped to take honey from it.

I have left the excluder out of a hive before with same result. The Queen will lay where the temperature is optimal. When the outside weather is cooler this will be at the top of the hive. It may be lower in the height of summer but I haven't observed this.

One of the reasons for selecting the Commercial brood body was to give the Queen more brood area than she could reasonably lay in and sufficient space for stores. The supers were for surplus honey.

Moving the Queen out of the super shouldn't be very difficult: move the frames to a new box, shaking them and exposing them to the light. The Queen should run from the light and hide in the Commercial box as the super is emptied. The existing brood will hatch in time and their cells will be available for honey storage. The main problem (apart from angry bees) will be if there are Drone cells. The Drones cannot fit through the excluder and so get stuck at the top, clogging the excluder. There is also a possibility that the Queen may run out of places to lay and become honey bound. Harvesting the super may sort that out by forcing the bees to eat stores in the brood area.

I'm supposed to be a lower intervention bee keeper. Here I am trying to force the Queen to lay here but not there. It's not really where I want to be but this is the consequence of wanting to extract honey.