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Excluder usage question

5K views 9 replies 9 participants last post by  kmartin 
#1 ·
I would like to try using an excluder to see how it works for me and would appreciate your feedback.

Equipment is all 8 frame mediums. If you have 4 meduims on a hive would you place the excluder on top of box 2 or 3?

I have read somewhere that you can put it on top of 2 box and regularly pull capped brood from 1 and 2, put in 3, replace with comb or foundation. Your thoughts?
 
#3 ·
I tried them one time and had no luck with them. If you have more than 1 hive, try putting them on 1 hive and compare the difference.. I could never get then to work in the supers above the excluder. If you do try one, make sure that the queen is below the excluder. Many people use them and have no problems and have good harvests off of their hives but my mentor told me to give her all of the room that she needs and feels that an excluder is a honey reducer. Good luck in what you do. If using all mediums I would give them 3 boxes. Go to M. Bushes site, bushfarms.com and there is a good article on unlimited brood chamber.
 
#4 ·
Excluder over plastic foundation

I have placed metal excluders over hive bodies which have all plastic foundation but come back to inspect after a week or so and find the burr comb which they seem to make in abundance on top of the plastic frames has almost completly plugged the excluder and they have not even drawn out the new super of wood frame / plastic foundation.
Is this a common problem with plastic foundation ?
 
#5 · (Edited)
For my mind there are a great many variables when it comes to the simple issue of the "queen excluder". When you're stuck in the rut of traditional bottom entrances, it is simple to understand why your results with queen excluders doesn't change. In that configuration, the incoming nectar must traverse the brood nest in order to reach the honey supers - once you realize that this trip is unnecessary, you can see that when the primary entrance is between the brood nest (below) and the honey supers (above), with a queen excluder restricting the queen to the brood nest - the incoming nectar only needs to be taken into the brood nest if it is going to be used in the brood nest to raise brood. And, instead of the bees having to cross the brood nest, then the queen excluder, to place incoming nectar in the honey supers, they must pass down through the queen excluder to put nectar into the brood nest. To my mind this is so much more the logical and practical way to use queen excluders. So far, it seems that way for my bees as well.

Alas, the idea for this use of queen excluders was not my own. But, now that I've tried it and seen how effective it is, I wonder why I never even considered trying it this way before, but I realize that I too was stuck in the rut of the traditional bottom entrance configuration. Now that I have no bottom entrances, I see many more benefits of upper and top entrances than I expected. Having bottom entrances gave access to an army of bee-eating toads, that had, in prior years, decimated the populations of many of my strongest hives - this just doesn't happen anymore. . . :D

Here are some links to posts I made about this issue, earlier (you may want to do your own search - there are many discussions of this topic to check out):

http://beesource.com/forums/showpost.php?p=328359&postcount=13

http://beesource.com/forums/showpost.php?p=327585&postcount=5

http://beesource.com/forums/showpost.php?p=316941&postcount=10
 
#6 ·
They also make decent screens for wax & cappings to drip honey out during uncapping, like over a tub or other catch pan. How they work in a hive, I couldn't tell - we do not and have no intention of using them in a hive.
 
#7 ·
I have never been a big user of excluders (except in a bit of queen rearing activity) in the past. after reading an article in an old bee magazine about the effect of using queen excluder and the direct impact of where and how many entrance was included in a stack (a singular hive- see mr clemens response #5) I decided to give it a try. I had excellent results, a significant improved yeild that was easier to remove.

next year I will likely increase the use of excluders on my honey production hives.

well perhaps you can teach old dogs new tricks?
 
#8 ·
queen excluders are all about proper use of the right equipment. What type excluder you use dictates what you could do to increase effectiveness. Upper entrances, not placing ONLY foundation above a newly installed excluder, placing it sideways, stepping up entrances, etc.

I have bees using an entrances above an excluder within seconds. The workers are also not inhibited from the supers and are not forced to go through any excluder, although one is installed....because I use them (plastic) sideways.

And I think anyone qualifying as using them "once" should try a second or even third approach, and perhaps find better use of excluder.

In the days when I thought I would leave the honey on till I could get a fall flow, (which I do not do any longer), then excluders was no big deal. By late summer, all the brood is forced down below.

But now I take my honey off after the main flow, (June/July) and I do not want brood in the supers. By doing so, I can make the summer splits I need, let the bees build up the rest of the summer and use the fall flow to get heavy with stores. Its nice to go out, take supers off, and be ready for the next phase of my operation.

As a side note....supers that have NEVER had brood raised in them are almost always free from wax moth damage. Keep clean supers, and you will have little damage.

For me, excluders are now something that fit my IPM management and business model very nicely.
 
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