Pete asks whether to remove a super left above the brood box for winter. If the queen excluder is already out, leave it alone until spring. If it's still in, do a careful winter inspection: remove the excluder, check the queen isn't on it, then reinstall it upside down to move the super below the brood box.
Right, so Pete says, is it okay for me to remove the super I left on above my brood box, which I should have removed before winter? I was told to leave it on, but I have a gut feeling it's not doing any good. So I'm not a fan of leaving supers on either above or below the brood box over winter, but it's really not, it's not a huge deal. The only risk that you're going to have on there, which I'm hoping that you've already done, is remove the queen excluder. If you, if you've removed the queen excluder, then definitely don't do anything yet, just leave the bees to it. there's too much risk going in now for, for a very little benefit, and the same benefit that you can get with nearly no risk later on in the season. So if you, if you took the queen excluder out already, just leave them to it, fix it in April. If you didn't take the queen excluder out already, you need to go in quickly, open them up as carefully as you can, take the queen excluder out, inspect it, make sure the queen's not on it, shake all of the bees off, put it back together again in the opposite way, and the reason I say the opposite way is that if you're going in anyway to take the queen excluder out, you might as well nadir it at the same time, which is take the super, put it underneath the brood box, knowing that come the end of winter the bees are very likely to be in the top box, which is where you want them to fix the kind of scenario that you're in, which is all of the bees up in the top box, which would then be your brood box, and no bees downstairs in the super. And then the fix to get it back right again is you remove the empty super, place the queen excluder on, put the super back on top. So As I said, that's the fix either way. It just depends on the timings for you, but don't, don't get too, too worried about it. It's really not that much of a big deal.
