Laying room is not storage

An excluder is a grid the workers pass through and the queen does not, so every box above it is storage and none of it is room for her to lay.

A colony boiling over has two problems wearing one face. If the bees have nowhere to put the flow, a super answers it. If the queen has nowhere to lay, a super answers nothing at all.

Open the hive and look at the brood box itself: frames of brood wall to wall under an arch of honey is a honey-bound queen, and the ladder is:

• another brood box
• then a manipulation
• then a split

More supers is not on that ladder. The second box is not free: the bees draw its comb out of honey, and a double brood colony keeps more of its own crop below.

It swarms less and crops less.