posted 12 years ago
honey bees do, indeed, prefer to build down. the trouble with the arrangement you've proposed is that as they build down, the comb is used for brood first, then honey and pollen after the brood moves out. the upshot: the brood nest is below honey. there are occasional exceptions to this, as when a queen "tunnels" and lays a column of brood in the middle of the hive from top to bottom, but that won't help in this situation.
it's a strong enough impulse for the bees to have the brood at the bottom that changing the structure of the hive will not be enough to overcome the arrangement.
in a Warre hive, the bees do build down perpetually, with brood below honey. this is why a whole box of honey may be harvested from the top of the hive without disturbing the brood and queen below.
the shallow depth of Perone's honey supers may contribute to the lack of brood there, but the location of the supers above the brood chamber is also important. the enormous brood chamber likely also ensures that the winter cluster and queen never end up in the supers because they won't exhaust the stores in the brood chamber. if they did, and moved up into the honey supers, the queen would lay there when pollen and nectar flow resumed in spring.
without very dramatic intervention or very unusual conditions, it's quite difficult to convince a colony to consistently store honey below brood. the one exception that comes to mind occurs in locations where nectar flow is exceptionally strong for a short season and honey-binding is an issue. that is more a case of there not being room for brood anywhere in the nest, though, rather than honey being stored below brood.
if the failure of one hive wouldn't be a catastrophe for you, I definitely encourage you to go ahead and try out the design you've proposed. your experience will certainly be instructive to you, and more than likely instructive to other folks, too. in the event that it works wonderfully, I know there will be a whole lot of beekeepers interested in what you learn, myself included.
you're trying to create a better hive, which I think is great. keep it up. but keep in mind that you're going to have to take into account an awful lot of sometime very complex honey bee behavior.