This is our first season with 3 hives. We started with a late swarm last summer, hived two more packages this spring and are loving every minute of watching the girls! They are amazing!
My question - We were trying to avoid using a queen excluder because our hives are going "great guns" and we were warned that a queen excluder sometimes has the negative side effect of making the bees feel crowded enough to swarm. In fact, we added the super originally because every frame in both deeps was completely covered with bees and we were worried that they would swarm. Now I have noticed some brood (larval and capped) on a few of the frames in the super of one of the hives and am needing some information/advice. I found the queen, gently escorted her back to the top deep and installed a queen excluder. Now, what to do with the brood in the super? Should I just let the bees raise that brood or do I need to replace those frames? If they raise the brood, and then clean and reuse the cells for honey, will the honey still be okay to eat?
I've been told that the queen will rarely travel across a honey-filled super so I'm assuming I keep the queen excluder in place until the first super is nearly full. Our blackberry nectar flow is just beginning here in the Seattle area (We need sun...what's new?) so it will most likely be a week or two before the bees can really ramp up production.
For the future, I'd love to know what experience others have had using queen excluders.
i used them last year with no problem. i let the bees start working the honey supers first, then added the excluder.
off hand, i can think of a couple of things to do with your brood. 1. if the frames are interchangeable with lower supers, swap brood frames for lower fames with no brood. 2. let brood hatch out. it won't hurt for them to re-use cells for honey. 3. put that brood in a weaker hive...if frames can be exchanged.
others will add :-)
Why does the brood worry you? It's just brood. Bees are very clean. The brood will hatch. The bees will clean and polish the cells and fill them with honey.
Either the brood nest simply expanded that far, in which case it provided you with more bees to harvest the flow and kept the queen from getting cramped and swarming, or they couldn't find anywhere to rear drones and put some somewhere they found cells big enough. The solution to that is to allow some drone comb in the brood nest. The brood nest expanding into the supers kept them swarming. I wouldn't give that one up.
If you want to use 5.7mm (7/11 from Walter T. Kelley) foundation in the supers, the queen will find them an odd size and prefer not to lay in them. Honey Super Cell also sells medium plastic frames in 6.0mm size with a fake egg in the bottom to discourage the queen.
I haven't worried about brood in my supers since I removed all the queen excluders in about 1975. If the queen needs somewhere to lay, more power to her.
Of course, if you had all the same sized boxes, you could just move the brood down to the brood chambers.
I would not worry about brood in the honey supers. It is no harm unless you where planning on cut comb. In fact, it will stiffen up the comb and make for easier extraction.
Make sure there is plenty of room for the queen to lay in the brood chamber (not filled with honey) and things will work out fine. SHe will eventually move back down and they will fill the honey supers with honey preventing her from laying in them again.
If you want to use queen excluders, rotate then 90 degrees so the ends of the frames are not covered. This provides free passage for foragers on the ends, but reduces the chances of the queen moving up as she tends to stay in the middle of the frames. This is not full proof though.
Glad to see you where able to get on the forum.....
Thanks for the advice. Since we started with the bees just last summer this will be our first honey harvest so we are still learning. We'd been told to use the excluder sparingly (they said it sometimes becomes a "honey excluder") but somewhere along the line, I guess we got the impression that having brood in the honey supers was not a good thing.
Robo: a further question about turning the excluders 90 degrees. My excluder has a wooden frame (about 5/8" thick or so) around the outside edge of the wire grid in the same dimension as the brood/honey boxes. If I turn it 90 degrees, it will leave quite a gap open to the outside at either end. Is this okay? Seems like a lot of open space for them to defend and also a little breezy in our sometimes cooler, wetter weather. Would this be an acceptable short term-arrangement or is there some other kind of excluder that you were making reference to? Thanks for your help with the registration problem. Glad to be here.
The plastic excluders work best for this, but nothing a little duct tape won't solve.
if you don't want bees stuck to your duct tape :-) you can tape on a bit of cardboard, or run the duct tape over paper.
Quote from: kathyp on June 14, 2007, 12:07:43 PM
if you don't want bees stuck to your duct tape :-)
They are amazingly good at walking on (and propolizing) duct tape and not getting stuck. I use it all the time to cover holes and stuff, and the only time I get stuck bees is when I tape them to it.
Deb-Bee,
Good to see another Washington beekeeper on the forum. My oldest daughter lives in Woodenville along with her husband and 4 of my grandchildren.
Limiting the brood chamber is an artificial management technique of man. I've found that letting the queen have as much brood area as she likes works well in building up hive/foraging strength. Since I use all mediums I don't worry about how big the brood chamber gets because I can always reduce it when it's time to harvest. If you haven't already, I would suggest you look into going to all medium boxes for everything. Uniformity rules.
Don't worry about bees in the super it is a beehive
kirko
Thanks for all the good advice and support! Very helpful as we learn and enjoy this new hobby with our family! My husband, who travels quite a bit, calls from overseas for the "bee report". I tell him the bees are doing great, and, oh by the way, your wife and kids are fine too! :)
Thanks for this thread. My question is also about brood in the honey frames. We do cut comb at my farm. I have two hive supers and a particular hive that's got a *lot* of bees in it. I took the honey supers off a week ago and found two with some brood in them. Since I needed to get the honey frames off the hive to do a fall apistan treatment, I put the few with some brood in the freezer rather than letting them hatch. My question is: if I keep these honey frames with brood/honey in the freezer for the winter, and put them back on a hive in the Spring, will the bees clean out the dead bees and fill the honey supers with honey if they're not too crowded? In hindsight, I probably should have just moved the frames to a different hive and let the bees hatch, but here we are.
No biggie but do you realize you posted on a 7 year old post?? And yes they will clean the dead brood out and then use them as they see fit.....
questions remain the same year after year. no problem with resurrecting an oldie. ;)
you got your answer to the cleaning out part. what you may not have considered is that you won't want to see cut comb from comb that has been used for brood. there's nothing wrong with it, but it won't look as clean. keep that stuff for you guys.
doing cut comb is probably the only good reason for using a queen excluder under the honey supers. still, it's a bit of an art....
Thanks for the responses to my comment - I think I'll probably just scrap the mixed honey/brood foundation and start from scratch, based on it "not looking as good". Also - I tried this once before, and actually wound up with a bit of old bee-parts in my honey...which, after the honey was thawed and stored for awhile, went bad.
Sorry about resurrecting an old post, I was looking for a thread that matched my question :) Good to know there's a community of beekeepers to turn to here, we had a man that helped us get off the ground but he's now retired so we're on our own...
Absolutely nothing wrong with reviving an old post. Some forums encourage it others don't care. It works either way. I'm wondering what you mean by "I'll probably just scrap the mixed honey/brood foundation and start from scratch". It is good for many other purposes and the bees worked very hard to make it, please don't just throw it away.
No reason to scrap it. I agree. A needless waste.
Quote from: sc-bee on September 14, 2014, 02:38:41 PM
No biggie but do you realize you posted on a 7 year old post??
Better late than never! :-D
...DOUG
KD4MOJ
>Since I needed to get the honey frames off the hive to do a fall apistan treatment
Apistan has not worked for a decade and a half.... I don't know why it's still on the market...