Queen Exclude & Honey Supers

[naturegrl22]

I am going to be putting on the honey supers and have heard many different reasons for using a queen excluder and not using one. What is everyone's opinions here about using a queen excluder and if you do use one, when do you put it on?

Thanks!

[gingerbee]

I use them. For me it's important when examining hives. When I need to go into the brood boxes I know the queen isn't up there; I don't have to check for brood there. If I suspect a hive is queenless I don't have to look for her in the supers.

Some say the queen doesn't usually lay in the supers so having them isn't important. Maybe others will weigh in here with their ideas.

[mlewis48]

I don't use them. I let her have free reign of the hive. But to each their own, I tried them but had a hard time getting the bees to go up into the supers. And that is one more thing that I will have to buy. With the cost of everything going up, save where you can.

[Dan Williamson]

Do a search. There are countless discussions on Queen excluder use and opinions both ways here.

[jasontatro]

One of the long time beeks in our club showed his excluders at our meeting last week and I really liked the concept. He has notched an entrance in his excluders to allow the field bees access to the honey supers without having to go all the way through the broodnest to get to them. Seems to work well for him, and I think I will give it a try.

JT

[Joseph Clemens]

I don't use them. I let her have free reign of the hive. But to each their own, I tried them but had a hard time getting the bees to go up into the supers. And that is one more thing that I will have to buy. With the cost of everything going up, save where you can.

That's part of the reason I replaced the bottom entrances with screens and slatted racks, placed the brood supers next (with a small opening to allow drones to escape), then a queen excluder. Above the queen excluder is the first entrance, an entrance rim with honey supers stacked above it. This way the bees aren't forced to transport nectar through the brood nest in order to place it in the honey supers - rather the reverse of this process - they have to go through the excluder to get to the brood nest but not to get to the honey supers. This is the first season I've done this, and I have found that it has worked very well. The bottom brood supers have remained full of brood with some pollen and very little honey. Once the honey supers are full and almost all sealed, the top brood supers have then been backfilled with nectar and some pollen, which probably would not be happening if I had more empty honey supers I could add to the stack. My strongest hives have already filled six or seven supers but the flow has not yet ended. I've been semi-frantically preparing more empty honey supers and putting them into service. I even recommissioned some, less than 100% serviceable, old dilapidated supers, just to take up some of the slack.

But this is not my own idea - I got this idea from a research report I found right here on BeeSource: [http://www.beesource.com/pov/hayes/abjaug85.htm].

[ScadsOBees]

I don't really like to use excluders, but I have quite a few foundationless frames for honey, and this sometimes will necessitate the use of them. The bees will most often draw out foundationless frames as drone comb and fill them with honey, but if you add it drawn out the queen will lay eggs in there disregarding any capped or full that are in the way. If I had just worker size comb up there I don't think that would be an issue.

Rick

[BeeAware]

I don't use excluders unless I am installing supers on a hive that has no honey stored in the upper brood box frames. Honey serves as a pretty good barrier to the queen. Usually she will not cross the honey stores to lay in the supers. If I super a hive before honey is stored in the frames directly below the super, I turn the excluder side ways across the upper brood box. This leaves the ends of the boxes open and allows the workers easy access to the supers. The queen usually remains near the center of the box below and rarely does an end run around the excluder. I sometimes do this when I place comb honey supers on a newly hived prime swarm.

[Michael Bush]

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesfaqs.htm#excluders

[BjornBee]

For me, sometimes I do, sometimes not.

If you are taking early honey off, then an excluder can be a great thing, since supers early on may have brood, where later in the season, the queen is forced down and the supers are clear of brood.

Having problems of bees not storing above the excluder, is usually for reasons of not understanding the proper use of equipment options such as a excluder turned sideways, the non-use of upper entrances, not baiting the supers, hives not ready, etc. There is no reason for anyone to ever claim bees will not store above an excluder. There are simple strategies and techniques that easily overcome and correct negative notion of excluders.

[naturegrl22]

Thanks for everyone's advice! Since I have two hives, I put an excluder on one of the hives and will wait a few days till I put the other excluder on the other hive. We'll see how my litte experiment goes!

[Ian]

When the bees are driven up looking for space, an excluder isnt going to stop them. Some hives I run one brood chamber, others I run two deep. the singles need the excluder, the doubles get away with out.
I use the excluder on both singles and doubles.

Ask my honeyhouse workers why,