Harvesting question

With my hive the only frames that have been fully capped have been the the outer ones.

The 4 inner frames never seem to get fully capped, and have a large central area that the bees hardly use. You can see images in the topic I raised last week. Honey cell capping pattern Last week I extracted just over 3Kg of honey from the frame next to the observation window, and yesterday I extracted just over 3.2Kg from the other outer frame. They have nearly filled up the first extracted frame again but are keeping clear of the central part of the central frames.

My setup is only one brood and one super. I wonder if other setups (double brood) reduce this wasted space.

Makes me think that your bees are telling you that they would LOVE double brood… :blush:

The bee club that I joined seem to prefer 1 brood and 2 supers. I’m located in SE Qld Australia (sub tropics, for the gardeners out there roughly US Plant hardiness zone 10).

Well, I can see your dilemma. Your club is telling you one thing, the bees are conveying (from what you say) something else. I am in Zone 10 too, and we (hobbyists) all run 2 deep brood boxes in my local area (or 3 mediums). The commercial guys may run on one deep, but nobody in my club with static (personal, non-commercial) hives does that, as far as I know.

I may be wrong, but I am just considering what the message might be from the bees.

Will ask again at the next club meeting in about 2 weeks/

Cheers