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Anyone have any prints or explain to me what one is/how to make one? Do I just staple a queen excluder to the bottom of a deep and shake bees down into an empty super? Should I put an excluder on the bottom of a deep with frames in it then bounce the box on top of the other box I want the bees into? I'm trying to get extra nurse bees into a queenless hive I'm going to use to graft with so I need to keep from accidentally adding a queen into the mix. Thanks for the replies
Nail a wood bound excluder to the bottom of a good hive body. Line the top 2" inside box with duct tape.
Place on cell builder and shake bees from combs of open brood, into the shaker box. The nurse bees will go down I to the hive. Drones and queens will be trapped above the excluder.
Exactly as Mike said. Here is a video of him doing it . . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUSMXpeuUFE
Thanks for the video Keth, what do you do with the frames of brood from the hive that has the spotty brood pattern? What do you do with the queen once you find her?
Moon,
In that video we were actually joking about the brood pattern. It was a beautiful sold frame of brood. Of the hundreds of hives that I saw at Mikes I never saw one that had what one would refer to as "shot brood". He has great queens.
Since we were building a queenless cell builder if we found the queen in the shaker box we would just pick her up and put her in the donor hive.
Thank you for this video. :) wish I had brood patterns like that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Keth Comollo
A couple of questions: Why the duct tape at the top of the box? Does it have to be a wood bound excluder, or would a plastic one work?
It is a funny thing but bees don't like walking across duct tape. They will but reluctantly. Once you have shaken 5-6 frames of bees into the box you do need to flick some down with the brush to keep them from boiling over but the duct tape acts as an invisible barrier noticeably. I learned this from Mike Palmer and it works. A few flicks of the brush, a small whiff of smoke usually is enough to get those valuable nurse bees heading in the right direction into the cell builder.
As for a plastic excluder I don't think it is durable enough. With a wooden framed metal one you can glue and staple it to a deep and it is quite bombproof. The shaker box spends a lot of time on the ground and well as in the bed of the truck and I think a plastic one would fail a lot sooner with the abuse of being dragged through one outyard to the next.