Shay

Agreed, with one caution: stop feeding before you put any super on that you plan to eat from, and watch that they are not so busy storing syrup that the queen has nowhere to lay.

Also normal for the last two outside frames never to get drawn in year one. Bees build in an arc, not a rectangle, and the corners are always last.

Check the temperature they report under load too. Datacentre drives are often specified for higher airflow than a quiet home case provides, and a 12TB helium drive at 50C in a silent case will not last four more years.

Bees are reluctant to cross an excluder onto bare foundation, especially plastic. The usual fix is to give them a reason: move one drawn frame up from the brood box into the middle of the super and drop an empty frame into the gap. Once there is drawn comb up there they treat the super as part of the nest and the rest follows quickly. If you have no drawn frames at all, take the excluder off for a week and let them start it, then put it back once they have committed.

Plastic works fine once it is waxed properly, but the factory coating is thin. Melt a little clean beeswax and paint a thin extra layer on with a cheap brush. It is the single highest return trick I know for getting a super drawn.

Do I still need a top entrance if I have a quilt box, or does that just let the heat out?

Measure before you optimise. A cheap plug-in power meter will tell you what the box actually draws, and in most builds I have measured the platform, the power supply efficiency at low load, and the drives spinning up rather than idling matter more than the drive count. An oversized 750W supply running at 8 percent load can waste more than two extra disks.

Congratulations on actually doing the wash, by the way. Most people who lose hives over winter never counted at all and conclude it was the cold.

Also worth writing the numbers in a notebook by date. Two seasons of counts tells you far more than any single reading, and you stop making the same August mistake twice.

Whatever you choose, put a frame of stores next to the brood nest. A colony rearing a queen in a June gap can go hungry fast if the flow pauses, and hungry colonies abandon cells.