Its February 2019 and I’ve deleted the original post from 2011. I don’t make or often use screened inner covers. They add a bit too much ventilation at times. But I do on occasion drop an empty moisture quilt on top of a hive like this:
See Moisture Quilt in a Nutshell for more details.
I could actually smell honey curing in the hives yesterday for the first time in the nearly 400 days I’ve been beekeeping. It came from the hive with the ventilated inner cover. I was walking by and noticed it right away, different than any other scent I’ve noticed wafting from the hives before.
Very nice.
And it only took about 400 days.