Tina Sebestyen
It can be frustrating to try to figure out when and how to use a queen excluder. Sometimes, the queen excluder seems more like a honey excluder, since the bees refuse to go through it, and end up super-filling the brood chamber with honey. This is dangerous, too, since this kind of crowding can cause even a first year colony to begin swarm preparations. Then, too, if no queen excluder is used, that young queen can lay so many eggs that she fills several boxes with brood, and all of the colony’s resources go to raising brood rather than being split between brood and honey production. Like everything else in beekeeping, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to when and how to use queen excluders, but understanding bee biology and how bees think can help you make proper decisions.
Keeping it from becoming a honey excluder
The colony’s first priority is expanding the number of colonies in the world, so the amount of effort they put towards making lots of babies is understandable. When they have a young queen who can lay 2000 eggs per day, and there is a lot of pollen and nectar coming in, it works well to let them build a large population of bees to take advantage of the coming nectar flow. But just before the flow begins, the queen should be confined to two deeps or three mediums, and the colony should be given plenty of room for honey. It sometimes takes a colony of bees a long time to make the collective decision to do something new. This is why, when you put a queen excluder above the working part of a hive, they never move up, but just super-fill the brood chamber with honey. The solution is to move a frame of brood or honey above the excluder. It will pull the bees right up to work it. You have effectively communicated to your bees that the working part of the hive is above the excluder, too. Yes, one of the “rules” of beekeeping is that we should never break up the brood nest. If you put the frame directly above the center of the brood nest, you haven’t so much broken it up as changed its shape. Of course, if the cluster isn’t big enough to handle this, moving honey will work, though maybe not as quickly as moving a brood frame would have.
Another solution is to close the lower entrance and add one above the queen excluder. According to one study, this will have the salutary effect of helping the bees raise more brood than they would if they had to haul the honey all the way through the brood chamber before getting to the honey super. With this set-up, the honey ends up almost all above the queen excluder, with only brood and bee bread in the brood chamber. It also puts a stop to skunk predation. Beware… working a colony with only an upper exit puts a lot of bees in the air, since their entrance is essentially “gone.” This might not make your neighbors or spouse happy.
Danger from open screened bottom board
Is it necessary to use a queen excluder to limit the amount of brood raised? Absolutely not. A full super of honey will work just as well. Occasionally a queen will cross honey to lay eggs, but usually they prefer to keep the brood nest compact. Sometimes just the arch of honey above the brood nest is enough to keep the queen confined. If they seem insistent upon moving the brood up, the problem may be too much ventilation through the entrance, or that the solid floor under the screened bottom board is out. This makes it very difficult for the colony to control the temperature and humidity well enough, so they try to move up and away from all of that incoming air. It has recently been shown that this reduction in humidity can make it easier for mites to reproduce, so the solid floor that slides in under the screened bottom board should always be in place, with something sticky on it, like Vaseline. This will make the bees happier, and the mites less happy.
There are some conditions that could increase the tendency to swarm, and these should be taken under consideration. One of the biggest reasons for swarming is reduced queen pheromone which leads to an increased swarm impulse. Since queen substance is not volatile (it isn’t very airborne), but is passed from bee to bee by touch, a really large population of bees stretches queen pheromone thin. A young queen, one who has not been through a Spring build-up, usually has enough pheromone to cover a large population, but by her second Spring, the queen’s pheromone might not cover all of those bees. If the queen is in her first season, a large population of bees combined with the fact that the queen is confined to just two deeps or three mediums should not trigger swarming if adequate space is available in the supers. If the queen is one year old or more, she should be removed to a nuc, with two or three frames of brood and at least one frame of food, and this nuc moved to a distant apiary. Or extra shakes of bees from over open brood should be given to ensure that the queen is not abandoned by too many foraging bees who will always return to their original home. This reduces her workforce enough that the swarming instinct is quelled. A young queen can be introduced to the parent colony, or it can be allowed to raise its own. Raising their own has the beneficial effect of giving the colony a brood break that can be an important part of Integrated Pest Management for varroa control.
Queen includer
There are other interesting uses for queen excluders, so it is a good idea to always have one on hand when visiting the bees. The queen excluder also makes a nice queen includer that can be helpful when installing a package of bees in new woodenware or when an imminent swarm is discovered, when adequate equipment is not immediately available. It is important to note that colonies that are preparing to swarm have very large populations of drones, and that they cannot pass through a queen excluder. It should never be used as a queen includer for more than a day or two.
Making a vertical split, or a two-queen colony
Another way that the queen excluder can be used to great advantage in swarm management is in making a vertical split. Here is an easy method that does not require the finding of the queen, which might be impossible with the huge population that accompanies a swarm-ready colony. Take the boxes apart, down to one on the bottom board. All of the frames that have open swarm cells should be placed in this hive body (open, so that we can see the age of the larva inside. We want queen cells all of one age). If all queen cells are capped, choose one to place in the bottom box and cut out or release the rest of the virgin queens. This will avoid the after-swarm that can occur when queen cells of different ages are left to emerge naturally. Be sure never to shake a frame that has queen cells, as this could damage the developing queen’s wings. Brush bees aside, so that there is a clear view of all potential queen cells which may or may not be on the edge or bottom of the frame.
Set another hive body next to the first one on a bottom board. As each frame is removed for inspection of queen cells, the bees should be brushed or shaken into this extra hive body. The queen will automatically end up here, because you brush or shake every single frame into this box. The nurse bees will stay with the queen while foragers go back to the original location. Open brood cells mostly go in this box, while capped brood mostly goes into the hive body with the queen cells. Leave one frame with larvae that are almost ready to cap, thus attracting soon-to-be unemployed nurse bees who will feed the queen cells. There must not be one single queen cell in the box into which the queen is shaken. When capped and open brood have mostly been separated, and every frame has been shaken into the box with the open brood, a queen excluder is applied above the box that has the queen cells. It can be helpful to place a honey super on the box containing the queen cells to further separate the old queen and emergent virgin queen. The hive body containing the old queen and most of the open brood go above the queen excluder with an auger hole drilled so that drones can fly. In this way, we have separated the capped brood and a lot of the workforce from the old queen, and these two steps allay the swarm impulse. When the new queen emerges, she can go out, mate and return and begin laying while the old queen above keeps the population growing. You now have a functioning two queen colony that will make a lot more honey than it would have, or than the two colonies could have alone. At the time of the Summer dearth, remove the queen excluder, and the colony will return itself to a single queen state, usually with the new queen at its helm (a good reason to mark queens).
Starting queen cells
There is an expensive piece of beekeeping equipment called a Cloake Board that is used for producing queen cells. It is a wood-rimmed queen excluder with a metal floor that slides into place. The queen is confined to one hive body, and with the metal floor in place, the bees think they are queenless, so they will start new queen cells. Once the cells are started, the colony will go ahead and finish them even after they realize that they are queen-right, and now the metal floor can be removed so that the colony can care for its old queen and her larvae, while finishing the queen cells. It is then only necessary to keep the old queen away from the queen cells so that she cannot kill the young queens before they emerge. This method of cell building can be accomplished just as well with a queen excluder and a piece of plywood, or even cardboard.
Finding the queen
A queen excluder can be used to find the queen, which might be necessary when replacing an old queen. Set all of the boxes aside that make up a colony, and place an empty hive body on the bottom board. Put the queen excluder on top of this. Start with frames that have eggs or very young larvae, and shake all of the frames from the colony over the queen excluder and set them aside, or quickly lift the excluder and put them in the box under it once they are bee-free. It can be helpful to set another empty hive body on top of the queen excluder too, to help funnel the bees through. It might be necessary to push the bees through the excluder with smoke. The queen will end up walking around on the excluder, and she’ll be easy to pick up with a queen catcher or with ungloved fingers.
Making Nucs
The queen excluder can be helpful in making nucs when it is difficult to find the queen. Choose frames that have open, or open and capped brood that will go in the nuc along with food frames, and after shaking the bees off into the lower hive bodies, place the chosen frames in a hive body above a queen excluder on top of the colony to be nuc’d. Nurse bees will come up through the queen excluder overnight, and the box can then be set down on a new bottom board and the new caged queen placed. Young nurse bees are more likely to be accepting of a new queen. It is also helpful to feed any colony that is receiving a new queen. Be aware that while this is a fine way of making a nuc, it is not a good way to split a colony to keep it from swarming. Leaving the queen with most of her capped brood and her workforce means that they will recover fairly soon, and want to swarm.
For beekeepers with top bar or long Langstroth hives, plastic queen excluders make it simple to trim to fit. Leaving the excluder a bit taller than the bars or frames makes it easier to keep queens from crossing over, using a piece of burlap or bubble wrap. The queen excluder is a valuable piece of equipment, and while it might not be necessary to have one for each colony, it is wonderful to have a few on hand for these various needs.
References
https://www.beesource.com/threads/queen-excluder-or-honey-excluder.365582/#post-1843984 American Beekeeping Journal – August, 1985, pg 564-567, by G. W. HAYES, JR.
Kraus, B.; Velthuis, H.H.W. High Humidity in the Honey Bee (Apis mellifera L.) Brood Nest Limits Reproduction of the Parasitic Mite Varroa jacobsoni Oud. (1997) Naturwissenschaften, volume 84, pp. 217 – 218
