So I wish to have as many opinions as I can get to try to decide on whether or not to use queen excluders during the honey flow. I would like to know if it effects the amount of honey the bees will take up to the supers. All advice is appreciated
Well I certainly want to maximize honey production during our poplar flow when that begins. Many applause and thanks already for the opinions and ideasThe question is poppy1, what is it that you want to have happen?
If you saw yds of 40 hives and more where each hive was a deep and a medium w/ an excluder and 8 or more mediums of honey above the excluder, would you think that excluders are a bad idea or a good idea?So I wish to have as many opinions as I can get to try to decide on whether or not to use queen excluders during the honey flow. I would like to know if it effects the amount of honey the bees will take up to the supers. All advice is appreciated
Maybe there is something wrong w/ that excluder and the spaces are too tight to allow passage, if no bees can pass thru it.When I first got it into beekeeping I inherited a couple of hives from my sister who got tired of doing bees and she used excluders all the time. Well the the first season one of the hive was strong enough to add a super on one of your flows and after about a week I open it up to see what's going on and only a few bees were up in the super. So I moved the box off to see what was going on and there were tons of bees pressed against the excluder but non would pass. So I thought maybe they were not ready to move up yet. Waited another half week and looked. Same thing so I moved the excluder and in short time they were in the super. They have that thing filled within the following week. So I haven't used them since. Also my sister used to complain about her hives swarming all the time. I have had her hives for three years and they haven't swarmed yet.
What that says to me is we have yet another person blaming the tool. I use them and no swarming issues. My honey yield averages far exceed state averages....snip..
"Another evil caused by queen-excluders, and tending to the same end—swarming—is that during a brisk honey-flow the bees will not readily travel through them to deposit their loads of surplus honey in the supers, but do store large quantities in the breeding-combs, and thus block the breeding-space. This is bad enough at any time, but the evil is accentuated when it occurs in the latter part of the season. ...snip...”
That very eloquently says what I think...
Yea, that's too bad. I'm sure there are other famous historical names that you could quote who never mastered the use of them also. There are lots and lots of people currently who have figured out how to use them correctly, thankfully.>What that says to me is we have yet another person blaming the tool.
Yea, too bad Isaac Hopkins spend his whole life as a commercial beekeeper and never learned how to do it right...