I will be adding honey super boxes over the next couple weeks. I do not use a queen excluder because I believe it is not efficient for the workers to have to squeeze through the excluder wire when they are full of resources (nectar, water, and pollen). The queen usually lays eggs in the middle super frames however, by harvest time, those bees hatch out and the cells are used for storing honey rather than for brood.
Organic Mite Control:
Some ways of controlling mites include:
Using a green plastic drone frame. This works well because all the mites somehow know that if they crawl into a cell with drone larva, when the larva is capped for the pupa stage, the mites can eat on the unborn honeybee four days longer. Once all the cells become pupa, pull the green frame out of the hive and place it in the freezer. This should kill most or all of the mites in a colony.
Bring a kitchen sifter with powdered sugar and dust the bees on both sides of each frame. The mites can't stay adhered to the honeybees. I order mite boards from Mann Lake to place at the bottom of the hive. When the mites fall off the bees, they stick to the paper and the bees can't stick because of the rubber mesh that protects them from touching the sticky board.
http://scientificbeekeeping.com/powdered-sugar-dusting-sweet-and-safe-but-does-it-really-work-part-1/
Swarm Prevention:
June is the month for the highest possibility of swarming. To prevent swarming:
Make sure you have a queen by seeing her and/or evidence of her (eggs & larva).
Kill and remove all queen cups and swarm cells.
Perform complete and thorough hive checks every 10 days.
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