I'm very new and inexperienced--I've got two hives, and one of them
looks like every picture in every book of how a hive should look. The
other one is...different. It has changed queens a few times, been at
times very cross, at time very gentle, has been sometimes full of
capped brood and sometimes not so much, and in weird patterns...

OK, so weird hive has two deep bodies, then one super (full) of
over-wintered honey, then a queen excluder, and then a sorrowfully
empty super on top. The hive is full of bees. The current queen has
been in for about a month.

When I opened the upper of the two hive deeps, I found several frames
of new capped honey--both sides, every square centimeter. In fact,
the cells the honey is in, newly drawn, extend out so far that very
little comb can be drawn on adjacent frames--there just isn't room!
It just seems odd--they have an entire super of their own honey that
they're not touching.

There are no pictures of this sort of thing in books. Am I just
seeing a normal variation here, or is there something to diagnose...?

Many thanks for thoughts, ideas, reflections, etc.

--Chris