Opening the hives - spring check

Last week I opened both Miro and Matai for the first time after the winter months and look what I found !! The busy little queen has been laying in the top boxes, even with plenty of room the bees have made extra cells on top of the frames which she has also laid in. I knew I should have taken the top 2 boxes off over winter, it won`t happen again thats for sure. I am going to put a queen excluder on both hives and will have to take frames with brood in and swap them around with frames from the bottom box. I put 2 apistan strips in each hive, down amongst the brood, they will come out next month. I did not see any sign of varroa or other disease and both hives were very busy with lots of flying too and fro! For the amount of bees and the time I spent looking through each box, I was amazed at how docile and calm we all were, it was a really peaceful experience - I do like working with bees ...

I`m not sure why, but these 2 gorgeous pieces of comb had been built inbetween the 2 top boxes, one had some larvae in it, the other was empty - would anyone know why this would happen ? I took the comb off and kept it for Lia to take to school. There was still plenty of room on the frames for the bees to fill - maybe they decided they wanted a penthouse suite !