Display JPanel on top of MapBean. (arcobjects)

I am working on creating a GUI that has a map and some menues in the form of buttons. This needs to be done in java and the map will be displayed in Esri arcobject MapBean control and the menues need to be overlaying the map so the map extends behind the menue pallete.The tricky part is obviously making menu pallete overlay the MapBean. I have attempted to tackle the problem using JLayeredPane but even though I set map panel index lower than menu index the map appears on top of menu taking up all the space in the window.

Here is relevant code:
MapBean mapBean=Map.getMapBean() //custom function to get map bean
JPanel pnlForMap=new JPanel();
pnlForMap.setLayout(new BorderLayout());
pnlForMap.setBounds(0,36,1280,768);
pnlForMap.add(mapBean, Borderlayout.CENTER);

PnlMainBtns pnlMainBtns=new PnlMainBtns(); // class extends JPanel
pnlMainBtns.setBounds(1035,36,235,978);

JLayeredPane lydpane=new JLayeredPane();
lydpane.setBounds(0,0,1280,768);
lydpane.add(pnlForMap, new Integer(0));
lydpane.add(pnlMainBtns, new Integer(1));
application.getContentpane().add(lydpane);

MapBean is of type JComponent but since whole java arcobject thing is a wrapper around COM/C++ there are probably nuances I don't know about.
Any ideas?