Babies in my honey!

The first picture is a wonderful frame full of honey and about half cured and capped. The bees take nectar from flowers, stick it in the cells, and then process it and evaporate moisture until it's under about 18% water. When the honey is finished curing, the bees add a protective layer of wax to preserve the honey until it's needed.

The second picture is from middle of the same box -- apparently the queen has moved up into my honey supers and is using them for her bee-making activities! I suspected this might happen when the bees filled so much of the bottom two boxes full of frames of pollen, but I was hoping there was still enough room down below to keep the queen happy.

On one hand, this is awfully inconvenient as I won't be able to just steal supers of honey off the top of the hive, I'll have to go through and carefully mix and match frames of honey when I take it off for the winter. On the other hand, I was a bit worried about crowding at the bottom of the hive, and that the bees are using middle frames all the way up for brood rearing suggests that I won't have to worry as much about swarming (although that should be largely finished by now). Practically, I'd have to go through the hive frame by frame anyway, and ensure that I leave enough honey and space for honey so the bees don't starve in the winter.

This development does somewhat dampen my optimism about the honey crop this year. It looks like there will be a lot of honey, and I'm sure the hive has at least 50 pounds stored away already, but I'm hoping to leave 80-90 pounds for the winter and without a more accurate count of individual frames I just don't know what to expect.

In the future, I could use a queen excluder to keep the queen out of the honey supers, but I'm leaning toward letting her roam -- if the brood boxes get stopped up with pollen and honey, I'd rather have her move up than force the hive to swarm, and I'm not working enough hives that it's a HUGE inconvenience to swap back frames of brood when the time comes to harvest the honey.