The beekeeping books tell you that you need to remove your supers in the fall and only have two boxes for the bees over the winter. The problem for me is that my bees won't physically fit in two boxes! This is common for backyard beekeepers as their hives tend to be in very good areas which allow for very large populations.
The hive in this picture is the hive that didn't split this year. Even when the field bees are out flying the four boxes left on the hive are pretty full of bees, when I took this hive down to three boxes and the field bees returned there was a pileup at the entrance as the bees tried to find a way into the hive. I added the fourth box (mainly because it had honey I wasn't able to harvest) and the bees resumed their normal behavior.
I've not found having a stack of boxes to be a problem, if anything it seems to help with ventilation. Another benefit is that any boxes I leave on the stack I can trust the bees to take care of and I don't have to store, in a hive without a queen excluder it can be hard to keep wax moths off of supers as they probably had some brood (and pollen) in them at some point.
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