Queen excluder = honey excluder?

[Dr.Wax]

I had read recently an article by a master beekeeper that you cannot expect to place a super of foundation on a queen excluder and expect the bees to come up and draw that foundation without swarming.

Is this true?

[jesuslives31548]

I place new foundation above the queen excluder all the time. I'm not sure how else you would get " honey supers" that are new drawn?

[Dr.Wax]

He seemed to be saying bees are very reluctant to cross the excluder into the honey supers which are not drawn. This will be my first time supering for honey so I don't have any experience to draw on.

[alpha6]

Dump the excluder. If you are running two deeps or even two mediums as brood boxes and you super them they will draw out the comb and fill it with honey. The honey is a natural barrier for the queen. We use excluders for splits and that's about it.

You are going to get all kinds of answers on this one, but my 2 cents from what I have seen is that bees do much better without the excluder.

[jasontatro]

Without an excluder, the queen will get up into the supers and lay.

What I did, was notch my excluder so that the bees have an entrance above the wire part. This allows them to get to the supers without having to fight their way through two deep brood boxes to get up into the supers.

My $.02

[alpha6]

We ran over 4000 hives without excluders and produced over 300 barrels of honey. Like I said everyone will have their own 2 cents on this one.

[Allen Dick]

Your profile says you are a first year beekeeper. As such, any advice we are going to give will probably not mean much until you have looked into some beehives over the shoulder of a long-time beekeeper.

Hopefully you belong to a bee club or will soon. If so, then attend, and ask questions, and invite yourself over to visit and even 'help' one of the members -- preferably a humble and well-respected member, not the loudest -- and make a friend to guide and show you how things should work in your region.

As far as excluders are concerned, so much depends on everything else you do, where you do it, and how you do it that I sure can't advise. I have run thousands of hives with and without excluders and all I can say is that every beekeeper should own one at least, and maybe one for every hive.

Whether, how, and when to use them, that depends...

[Dr.Wax]

Interesting perspectives. I think I am more confused now than before I asked the question though!

Found this from an article by George Imirie:

However, so many people complain that the bees won't go through the queen excluder to make use of the super, and some unknowledgeable people have even referred to a queen excluder as a "honey excluder". They are unknowlegeable because they don't know how or just refuse to "BAIT" a super so that bees will not resist going through a queen excluder to get to the super. Baiting a super is very simple! On April 1st, set a super directly on the top brood body WITHOUT a queen excluder, and inspect it at the end of a week. After you find two or three frames of that super partially filled with something, either nectar or maybe brood, make sure the queen is back in the brood chamber and add a queen excluder under that super, because the super is now baited and the bees will freely go through the excluder now to do their jobs.

I guess I will try it with the excluder off for a few days.

[beedeetee]

I think that it is normally fastest to start them off without the excluder. When they have started drawing comb and placing little nectar in the foundation, you can place the excluder. After you have drawn comb, you don't have to worry about this so much.

What I did was put an excluder on some hives and not on others and see what worked best for me. I now put excluders on all of my hives. If you don't mind sorting brood from honey you can probably skip the excluder. My bees seemed to have no problem moving honey out of the bottom 1/3 of my lower honey super and having the queen lay there when I removed the excluder after the super was full. So now I leave it in and don't see any obvious difference in honey production.

[beedeetee]

One more point. It seems that having a fall flow and waiting until then to pull supers may be the reason that some have no problem with larva in the supers. We don't have any fall flow here. Our flow stops around the end of July, just when the hives are at the largest population. If we want to pull supers then, I almost always found larva in the honey supers.

If we had a fall flow, it is likely that the bees would have started backfilling and moving the brood nest lower, so finding larva in the supers would be less likely.