Hi everyone,
New beek here looking for some advice going into this fall and winter. My first year hive consists of 2 deep boxes (10 frame) for the broodnest and 2 medium supers (also 10 frame). It was started from a nuc in April. I inspected 2 days ago and this is what I found:
Bottom deep: mostly just pollen and nectar stores.
Top deep: eggs, larvae, capped brood, pollen & capped honey (only about 1 full frame's worth of honey).
Supers: both contain 9 frames of 99% capped honey.
I've gotten lots of conflicting advice on how to manage this hive going forward. My initial thought was to just leave the supers on, the winter cluster could then move up through their stores as needed. The downsides to that approach are a larger space for them to heat and I may end up with brood in the supers come spring. Some other advice I've gotten is to remove the supers and feed them 2:1 syrup through the rest of the fall, overwintering in just the 2 deeps. My concern with this approach is whether they have time left to store that much. I'm in NY (Zone 5).
Or, maybe I should do nothing right now. Might they start moving the honey down from the supers into the deeps as they wrap up brood-rearing?
Any ideas?