Quote Originally Posted by susbees View Post
How do you know bees like to go up, perhaps it's just that trees tend to grow that way? And they like to be high up, but I don't see that many hives off the ground very far (and office blocks don't count) ...
Watching them for the past 4 years or so, in standard hives, various long hive adaptations including a fair few Top Bar Hives and speaking to others who've tried long hive variations. I'm not entirely unconvinced that the WBC might not have the right idea with only 10 frames in the brood boxes.

If you stick a super on a brood box, especially a 14x12 that only has 8-9 frames drawn out they'll tend to ignore the outside frames in favour of playing in the super instead.

As for height, I'm not convinced that it has much of a bearing. They tend to nest high up in the wild because, most likely, that's where the majority of suitable sites are to be found. Tell the bees that quite happily settled in an empty nuc I'd forgotten to close up that they should be looking for sites 10+ feet, rather than 10 centimetres up in the air.