To mitigate the risk of the colony swarming (again) I added a second brood box. I’m keeping my fingers crossed but it seems to have worked. Now both brood boxes have a lot of honey - probably 50/50 capped/uncapped, but half of the super flow frames are 50% full, the others less so.
With the risk of swarming now reduced is there a way I can encourage the bees to take the honey up to the super ? Maybe by reducing the space in the second brood box with dummy board/s or adding a frame feeder (without syrup) ? I want to get back to the point of only having 1 brood box.
Hi Adrian. If you had an empty super, you could put all the honey frames without brood in one box, before placing it above the Flow super & crown board, separated by an empty super. Then remove the cappings on one frame to start with. Hopefully the bees will remove the honey from that frame, before storing it in the Flow frames. If that works, go ahead & remove cappings from only one frame at a time.
I generally find that if I remove honey cappings, bees will remove all the honey, rather than recap it. In your case, with the empty honey super below the honey, the bees will likely move the honey down closer to the brood.