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I've had to use my horizontal hive a couple of times to rob frames/brood for various reasons. That said, I've been in it twice and found supercedure and swarm cells(queen cells that look like peanuts that indicate queen is being replaced, or they're planning to swarm). There is plenty of room and I'm not sure why that's happening.
The first time I plucked out the queen cells, and the last time I had decided to use them as a backup plan. I had a tree trap out the past month and I decided it was time to bring them home. When I did, it hadn't completely worked, they hadn't made a queen and the queen wasn't in there. I went back into the horizontal hive to pull the frame with the queen cells, and 3 days later they were all gone/chewed away.....and the bees were mean as hell. It was hot and evening, but they were mean and I got chewed up pretty good again, through my gloves and suit and some got up my pants let and back of my jacket.
I'm going to pull another swarm trap that has bees in it, and will merge it with the trap-out hive I brought home, hoping that queen will take over the colony.
It's been too hot for the removal a couple of posts above, but I'm still going to do it and then I'm not planning to do much more than manage hives with added boxes until time for harvest.
I've worked my ass off this year. I hope it's worth it at harvest.
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