Hi Dawn, that’s what I’ve been saying. That bees will move honey from the brood area so that the queen can lay eggs during the spring.
I have my doubts as to whether bees will take honey out of one honey frame to place into another honey frame. There would have to be a logical reason, if they did do that.
Oh I see, you are saying they don’t move honey around in supers, just from brood to super. I will have to think of an experiment when I am retired to test that idea. It is not that I doubt you, just that I would really love to try it out. 
I’m sure I have seen on here that folk have moved central flow frames that are full to the outside hoping to get empty outside frames full only to find in a couple of days the middle frames full and the outside ones empty again. Perhaps I’m wrong. I only ever move capped super frames in a similar fashion knowing the bees won’t move the honey if the frames are capped
Hi @Dee & @Dawn_SD, none of my ideas are set in stone. The explanation that I can think of why the bees would move the honey from the outside frames to the middle frames is that they want to keep everything in a tight ball, so to speak.
When I rob, say 4 frames out of nine, I put the other 5 frames to one side. Then I put the stickies back into the other side. Sometimes when I go back to rob again, the 5 frames that I left will be full, hence the 4 previous frames wont be ready. I don’t see the bees shifting honey from the outside of the first five frames to the middle, once the 4 stickies are returned. Maybe it happens at different times without me noticing it.
However I do see a lot of evidence that bees shift honey in order for the bees to expand the brood.
Sometimes I’ll put a beautifully drawn frame half full of honey into the brood, knowing that the bees will remove the honey so that the queen can lay in it.
The pace at which that frame filled back in is far greater than the current nectar flow, so they must be moving the stores around and the size of the colony, I doubt they are consuming that much. One nice thing about having that window in the back, it’s easy to monitor the actual progress.
This hive is located in the middle of the city on a rooftop, so the foraging is very diverse, just depends on what people are growing. The nectar comes in at a slow and steady pace all year long, with a little surge during spring. Unlike my other hive at my house, it gets a strong flow in the spring and very weak during the winter.
Hi Bruce, that’s interesting. That has changed my line of thinking on the subject. There has to be a logical reason why the bees would go to that trouble.
I wonder if the honey on the outside frames was capped. I wonder if they would uncap honey in order to shift it into the middle frames. I also wonder what is happening with the frames on the sides in the brood box. I wonder if there is brood right across the whole brood box.
I’m thinking that if the brood extended right across the brood box, then the bees may not feel the need to concentrate the honey into the middle. Just a thought.
If you think how bees keep their hives in the wild it’s more rounded in shape and the corner end frames are the last thing they fill when out of space. I’ve been taking pictures every few days lately, so I know their progress and think they are still trying to keep that rounded pattern. These bees were a feral swarm I caught over the summer.
The end frames were capped except for the very ends! Frame 5 (left to right) was mostly capped and it looks like they uncapped some of it as well.
You can see in this picture how it was just before harvest.
Yes I agree Bruce about the bees wanting to maintain that rounded pattern. I mentioned that to @Dee & @Dawn_SD. Also it occurred to me that you are in winter now. I wonder if they would do this during the summer or in the middle of a honey flow.
I’m keeping to a single brood box, hopefully it’ll discourage them from swarming, I have a medium super to add this year. Last spring my bees swarmed and it never got a viable queen back in the hive, so I missed the main flow, this should give them the space while waiting for all the frames to be capped.
Would be nice to have a way to do a time-lapse video, I might have to build a cover with some red LED lighting and try one day
Oh I know another way to test if they are moving stores around, I take a photo after the bees are done foraging during the day, then another the next morning before they leave the hive.
While reading this thread, I remembered a series of events with my double brood Italian hive.
Mid December, I took 2 splits from that hive and reduced to 1 brood box. The next day, I harvested the 4 inner flow frames.
On checking the day after, those flow frames were almost full again! The bees obviously did some serious honey shifting after the split and harvest.
My thinking now is, the bees shifted all the honey from the brood box up into the super. There had been a fair bit of capped Honey down there because I had 2 brood boxes. The bees needed the space for brood.
However, because I had to go away for 3 weeks, I put a second fresh flow super on top. We are in a good nectar flow and I was worried the bees would run out of Honey space.
Just returned home. Ready to do my bee round after a nice coffee. Can’t wait to see what the bees did in the meantime. The hives I can see from the house have a lot of fast foraging traffic.
Hang on Bruce, do you have to climb onto a roof every time you do this? It’s probably a better idea to focus on other bee related issues, such as seeing how you can prevent the hive from swarming in the not too distant future. The extra medium super will only delay the inevitable. Plus, when they do swarm, it’ll be a bigger one.
The hives at my house I let them swarm, but I always get a mated queen to come back. The apartment hive I need to take a different stance and do what I can to prevent them from swarming. I’ll just try the shake method this spring then add a new queen to them. The current queen I’d rather keep in this hive since she keeps a really strong brood pattern, heck the first month I dumped the swam into the hive, 6 of the 8 frames were wall to wall brood. Oh and she’s really good at hiding, never saw her when I caught the swarm and during all my brood inspections. I think this is my first hive that I have yet to see the queen, but when I do I might clip her wings to play it safe.
It’s real easy to get up there, we have one of those pull down ladder roof access points, so I only use 8-frame boxes, 10 is too wide to get through.
Well done Bruce, sounds like a good plan. The exercise on the ladder wont do any harm either.
That’s what I tell people about my hand spinning the honey. I can use the exercise.
Around us, it is Agave and Eucalypts. 
Hi Dawn - do you know what sort by any chance? Blue gums?
I am ashamed to say that I don’t. They have messy red flowers, and the local parrots (we have several flocks of escaped parrots living wild in our suburb) love them. I do know that a lot of blue gum was planted at the end of the 19th century (late 1800s) in San Diego, but I thought that blue gum flowers were cream or white. Like other eucalypts, these are very tall (over 70 feet), shed bark like crazy, and nothing grows underneath them.
Bruce, I don’t know if you have this book?
http://www.calbeebook.com/main_page_layout.php?body=PURCHASE
It is a good source of knowledge for what is flowering and when. The web site has a sample page, which fortunately has pollen and nectar sources for January listed:
I don’t like his Varroa management methods (drone larval destruction), but the flowering information is very useful.
I got lucky when called to this swarm, they are so friendly that I hardly suit up. They have has no beetles and manage the Varroa so well that I hardly ever need to pull frames to inspect, just remove the super, then pull the box off the base and look from the bottom is all I do with this hive now. The one’s at my house are another story, they get plenty of beetles, but seem to manage them and the mite count is low so I haven’t needed to smoke them for it this year.
