# Queen excluder = honey excluder?



## Dr.Wax (Apr 30, 2008)

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?


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## jesuslives31548 (May 10, 2008)

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?


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## Dr.Wax (Apr 30, 2008)

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.


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## alpha6 (May 12, 2008)

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.


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## jasontatro (Feb 6, 2008)

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


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## alpha6 (May 12, 2008)

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.


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## Allen Dick (Jan 10, 2009)

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...


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## Dr.Wax (Apr 30, 2008)

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. :scratch:


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## beedeetee (Nov 27, 2004)

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.


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## beedeetee (Nov 27, 2004)

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.


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## Dr.Wax (Apr 30, 2008)

Since I have no drawn comb to put in the super I guess I will put 10 frames of foundation in one and put it on without the excluder. This hive is in my backyard so I can check it every few days for signs of them drawing it out and if the queen gets in there I can move her back down at that time and put the excluder on.


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## Hobie (Jun 1, 2006)

Bees will be bees. I put supers of drawn comb over a queen excluder, and no bees would pass through to fill it. I have put supers with some new foundationless frames directly on the brood chambers (2 deeps) and they drew drone comb, but no brood was ever laid there.


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## justgojumpit (Apr 9, 2004)

I just use three deeps for the brood chamber. This is what they overwinter in, so if the top deep has a little brood in it, that doesn't bother me. The brood nest doesn't ever seem to expand past the third box. I know some people are eager to get the extra honey off the hive, but the way I look at it is that the bees will use what they need, and the rest will still be there in the spring. I can then use these leftover frames of honey to make nucs.

justgojumpit


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## Joel (Mar 3, 2005)

{We ran over 4000 hives without excluders and produced over 300 barrels of honey}

Alpha if my math is right that's only around a 45 - 50 lb. average per hive. Where did you run your bees?

We've run our operation for years without excluders and have for years with them. I've never had an upper brood chamber fill with honey enough to block a queen for honey supers when I wasn't running an excluder because the bees always filled from the top down when a flow was on. Almost without fail, especially in 2 queen units, we would have the outside frames in upper supers filled and the queen would start in the top and lay right down through the center with the common half moon of honey in the center frames. Since we pull honey several times a year to get focused floral source crops what a hassle. We also found queens in the honey house on "honey super" brood combs and I'm sure we blew some out with blowers.

We leave an entrance for field bees above the excluder, get just as much honey and don't have to hassle with brood in our honey supers. This apparrently is not a concern for you. You may do better if you only pull honey once a year to go without since an excluder is going to slow down bees moving between supers and brood chambers.

Look, the best thing to do is experiment in your own operation and see what works best for you!


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## Allen Dick (Jan 10, 2009)

And, the abandonment method will not work without excluders.

http://tinyurl.com/dlk8o2

Not everyone will find that a problem, though.

Using excluders is an expert technique, though, and many of us oldtimers and pros don't appreciate the problems beginners have understanding things that are so obvious to us, like season, hive strength, flow conditions, space below the excluder, type of bee, etc.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

I don't generally use excluders, but I do on occasion for reasons related to queen rearing and other things. 

The problem you have presented is getting them to cross the excluder to draw comb. It's much easier to get them to cross the excluder to store honey in already drawn comb. Once you get them crossing the excluder it no longer seems to be a problem. So the trick is just getting them going across it. This can be done partly by just leaving off the excluder long enough to get them drawing the comb, so there is drawn comb on the other side that they are in the habit of working already. Another trick is to put some open brood above the excluder to get them going across it and then either move it back down or let it emerge there. This, unfortunately for some, requires the same size frames above as below the excluder.


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## Allen Dick (Jan 10, 2009)

Good point. 

Something else to consider is that if the colony in question is used to fully occupying a second box or more boxes, and you pull the second off and replace it with a box of foundation, they will be up there in a jiffy, excluder between or not.

If they have always been in only a single, even if they were a bit crowded, and never had a second, they will take their time, especially if an excluder is in the way.


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## bleta12 (Feb 28, 2007)

I do use excluders only when I produce comb honey. I do variations of Killian method so everything is on one deep, excluders and comb suppers.
This is the only time I do use and recommend the use of excluders.

Gilman


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## Allen Dick (Jan 10, 2009)

That is really odd. Producing comb honey was the only time I did not use excluders, except for the year my son talked me into not using them for extracted honey. I never neded them for comb honey. We seldom got even a cell or two of brood in the comb honey and we produced thousands of supers.


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## BGhoney (Sep 26, 2007)

I usually use excluders, Kinda nasty hot knifing brood.

The post with George Imire in it . Bait them with brood, or let the queen lay up there and then move her down. That will work however, the brood hatches out but the pollen that remains plugs my filters.:no:


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## bleta12 (Feb 28, 2007)

allend said:


> That is really odd. Producing comb honey was the only time I did not use excluders, except for the year my son talked me into not using them for extracted honey. I never neded them for comb honey. We seldom got even a cell or two of brood in the comb honey and we produced thousands of supers.


There is nothing odd about using an excluder on top of a single deep for comb production only, no liquid honey, in fact, in that configuration, using an excluder is the only solution for having comb honey.

If you never used an excluder to produce comb honey, you probably are referring to 2 deep hives plus supers for liquid and then add a super for comb some place on the middle after the start of honey flow. 
Gilman


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## GaSteve (Apr 28, 2004)

I think an upper entrance for the foragers to return to will offset any disadvantages of using excluders. You also could try putting the excluders on the hive sideways. Since queen don't usually travel much to the frame ends, the chances of her getting into the supers is greatly reduced. That leaves a lot of space at the ends for workers to travel back and forth.

As others said, brood in the supers is a real pain at extraction time. But it's even worse when it comes to storing supers. I've found that even one generation of brood in comb will draw wax moths and hive beetles in droves into those supers. But moths and beetles won't touch comb that has never had brood in it.


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## Allen Dick (Jan 10, 2009)

> If you never used an excluder to produce comb honey, you probably are referring to 2 deep hives plus supers for liquid and then add a super for comb some place on the middle after the start of honey flow.
> Gilman


We used every conceivable configuration without excluders and never had a significant problem. (We were the world's largest producer of Ross Rounds comb honey for years, according to Tom Ross). 

Usually we crowded bees down into a single and added comb boxes on top.

Producing comb above doubles is more chancey, and IMO, less productive, although I do know good comb guys who do that. Wintering is better afterwards, up here in the North, so there is a trade-off.

We never mixed extracted and comb production on the same hive at the same time, although we sometimes pulled down extracted hives and converted to comb production by splitting the two broods into two new stands and other times by sorting the brood into one box, then adding comb boxes.

We started with the standard of bees and brood on the bottom and stacked the comb boxes directly on top. If we started with a package, one or two comb boxes to start, if a larger colony broken down to a single, sometimes 4 comb boxes to start. Our finishers sometimes were 12 boxes high. All comb foundation, and no excluders anywhere.

In extracted production, though, we almost always used excluders above single or double broods.


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## beekeeper_sd (Oct 30, 2008)

One more opinion. Excluders also exclude honey production. And it is much harder to drive the bees out of the top supers with excluders on.


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## bleta12 (Feb 28, 2007)

allend said:


> We used every conceivable configuration without excluders and never had a significant problem. (We were the world's largest producer of Ross Rounds comb honey for years, according to Tom Ross).
> The queens don't like to get and lay on Ross Round suppers, so no excludes are needed there.
> 
> 
> ...


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## Michael Palmer (Dec 29, 2006)

bleta12 said:


> allend said:
> 
> 
> > Allan can you be specific on you using no excluder on one deep with cut comb supers?
> ...


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## tecumseh (Apr 26, 2005)

the question: Queen excluder = honey excluder?

tecumseh:
do you wish it to be? I think we have traveled down this road (question) before? 

use the excluder improperly and yes it will reduce you honey crop. use an excluder in a proper manner and you may find your honey crop is actually larger. I did... 

if you think (incorrectly) that a worker does not have some difficulty in passing thru an excluder then you are just simply uninformed... as a barrier to new comb or old comb it doesn't really make a spit of difference.

the black cat goes back to lurking...


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## jesuslives31548 (May 10, 2008)

I run 2 medium supers then add mediums for honey supers. I have hole drilled in the first hoeny super above the the queem excluder. Have not had any trouble making Honey. But its possible that Im restricting my fow with the excluder. I wold be interested in trying it without the excluder but fear it would be ful of eggs. Remember the area I live we only have a few weels of cool weather. Its Last week January and I just added another honey super due to explosive maple bloom and swamp titi........


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## brooksbeefarm (Apr 13, 2008)

jesuslives31548 said:


> I run 2 medium supers then add mediums for honey supers. I have hole drilled in the first hoeny super above the the queem excluder. Have not had any trouble making Honey. But its possible that Im restricting my fow with the excluder. I wold be interested in trying it without the excluder but fear it would be ful of eggs. Remember the area I live we only have a few weels of cool weather. Its Last week January and I just added another honey super due to explosive maple bloom and swamp titi........


Count your blessings.I'm looking out the window at 2 inches of ice and snow and it's starting to snow again.I have lost 14 hives out of 50, and will probably lose some more before spring.It cheers me up to hear the maples are blooming in your area,I've got another 3 to 4 weeks to wait here.Good to know spring is almost here.:thumbsup:Jack


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## jesuslives31548 (May 10, 2008)

we all have our blessings, but moving bees 4 times in one year out of the path of Hurricanes is not fun. The hot humid weather from april- october is down right misrable at time. Not to mention the wonder small hive bettles we have. I guess we all have our good and bad. But I give it to you guy that deal with the sub zero temps and snow. Its not for me thats for sure.


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## Allen Dick (Jan 10, 2009)

Queen excluders are one of the most common and most misunderstood pieces of bee equipment, ranking immediately after the smoker. 

Queen excluders are an expert tool, and as such are very useful to experts and a rather chancey for the majority of beekeepers.

There are things to know. Bees are not all the same size and neither are the gaps in all excluders, but for most intents and purposes, we can ignore that fact. I measured some a while back. I don't know if it is representative http://www.honeybeeworld.com/misc/excluders.htm

I did hear of one case where bees that could go thru some plastic excluders in Montana, had problems when moved to Maryland. This from a respected researcher, and he had no explanation.

That having been said, I have never had problems using excluders when I applied my knowledge of bees, but there may be things outside my personal experience.

I've written about excluders previously, and some of that can be found via http://tinyurl.com/cr288b Hint: Use Ctrl+F and 'excluder' in your browser to find the specific reference on the pages. Some of the references are incidental and some are deeper discussion of excluders.

In summary, however, I have a few rules that work for me:

1.) Bees that are used to going through excluders will go through excluders with little encouragement. Bees that have no experience with excluders can be reluctant. 

2.) When adding supers in the spring, bees will tend not to go up through supers into newly added boxes. 

Bees are reluctant to expand through excluders into newly added drawn combs from storage or foundation unless they need more brood room than they have under the excluder. Thus, they will go up more easily thru an excluder on a single brood chamber than thru an excluder on a double brood chamber and -- even more so -- an excluder on a three-box brood chamber. 

All this assumes that the colony has reached the point where additional room is actually required.

In fact, in the latter two cases can be a somewhat difficult, especially when adding cold excluders and new boxes from storage, and if there is a honey barrier and the brood is not near the excluder, they may just sit there or swarm. Thus, reversing before adding excluders and supers is sometimes indicated.

3.) Bees will go back where they were accustomed to being, excluder or no excluder. 

Example: If you take a hive that is six or seven boxes high and full of bees top to bottom and stick excluders between all the boxes (say, to isolate the queen to one box so you can find her more easily), the bees will go up and down as if the excluders are not there. Of course drones can be trapped in the boxes and conceivably plug the exluders, so be careful.

The upshot is that you can insert excluders into an established, well populated hive anywhere and not have problems with the bees passing through.

4.) Bees like equipment that has been recently occupied by bees and has fresh scent and warmth, and have less interest in cold equipment or honey frames that have been in storage.

As far as cut comb is concerned, I did not make any intentionally, but did sell full frames of fresh comb at the farmers market sometimes. I would not count on making cut comb without excluders, though unless the broods were deeps and the cut comb in shallows. Even then, and even with good timing, I would not count on getting frames without brood. Queens just love that new comb. Some people say they can do it, though.

In the case of Ross Rounds, the queens just don't seem to like them. At all.



> Me too, Allen. Or, removing extracting supers to another colony in the yard, and making cut comb on a double brood chamber?


Making cut comb is really just the same as drawing new foundation, except you don't want the queen to get into it, so an excluder is required. As explained above, if the bees are accustomed to a large hive, when they are forced down into a smaller brood chamber, they will rebound back into whatever is placed over the excluder.

Hope this helps.


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## bleta12 (Feb 28, 2007)

Great points on excluders. thanks Allan.


Thanks Gilman


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## Dr.Wax (Apr 30, 2008)

Allen, thanks for the detailed reply. That answered a lot of my questions.

I just added my third deep brood box yesterday after I saw the large amount of capped brood already present in the first and second floors. The queen is now very active in the second deep. I might have reversed hive bodies but I hear that doesn't work well in my part of the country.

This is a large and growing hive and as a first year beek in my first spring I am very excited about the potential of this hive. I sure don't want them to swarm and I would love a nice honey crop and of course the two are related.


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## mwjohnson (Nov 19, 2004)

Allend
Do you ever have a problem with pollen in that 1st round section super after you've crowded them down?

I have found, like you say, the queen doesn't like like them, but some colonies will use some of them for pollen. 
Not a big precentage seem to do that, but even a few is a drag...
Any tips for preventing that?
I've resigned myself to supering over 2 deeps, to try and prevent this from happening....

Dr. Wax
I think,
for me they are something I find to be needed.
But...I have learned that you gotta treat your excluders nice.
A old comb honey guy I know taught me a quick way to check for bent wire is to hold the excluder with the main wires running parallel to you (to the left and right) with the sun behind you.
Now tilt it and sight over the top of your excluder and a bent wire (unless, in highly unlikely event that it's exactly in the same plane as the others) will stand right out at you. It will sortta glint at 'ya, you know.
Wierd, but it works, and is pretty quick once you get it.

Before you decide, how about doing a side-by-side trial with a couple equal sized colonies and then make a comparision as to how your yield is affected (if any)?


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## Allen Dick (Jan 10, 2009)

> Do you ever have a problem with pollen in that 1st round section super after you've crowded them down?


Actually, I can say, "never". Strange, now that you mention it, but we _never_ have a pollen surplus here. That is why I am such a patty feeding nut.

If you have a problem like that, or a drone pupa or two, which maybe happened once in a hundred boxes, just dig it out and put the comb back on a hive to be fixed. (Hint: turn it top for bottom in the frame). That works for half-capped combs, too.


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## mwjohnson (Nov 19, 2004)

Thanks 
Patty feeding nut? Do you think that is a factor in either finding or not finding pollen stored above the brood in a crowded down colony?

I haven't done that much comb honey, and have only tried crowding them into a single a couple times...and while it "might" have made a difference in my harvest, I didn't like finding those sections.
Thanks for the tip too.

Sorry if I'm getting off the doctors question.


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## Allen Dick (Jan 10, 2009)

Well, as I mentioned under the excluder discussion, bees get used to a certain hive geometry and if you pull off a box and replace it with another, the bees will rush back there. 

Are they the same bees as were there when chased out, or do all bees cruise the whole hive and work everywhere? 

I really don'[t know, but if they are like most people and animals and have a fairly fixed range of travel most of the time, one might wonder if some of the bees that have been used to storing pollen in a second might just keep storing it there when the brood comb is changed for a super of foundation. 

This might be particularly true where the brood comb below is new comb, like the new comb above. We generally had brood combs that are quite dark.

Moreover different strains of bees have very different pollen gathering and storing habits.

All just conjecture...

The amount of pollen coming in could also be a factor as well as top entrances. we never used upper entrances for comb, since bees do not draw comb reliably near entrances, and we also try to keep the temps up in the comb supers to encourage full occupancy day and night.

North of here, beekeepers have had so much pollen in frames that they had to pull pollen frames and replace with empties to give the queens room to lay in spring.


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## Sundance (Sep 9, 2004)

I am a big fan of top entrances. I my opinion they
help a lot regarding excluders.

They also keep the comb cleaner not traveling over
brood on each forage trip.


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## Allen Dick (Jan 10, 2009)

I used to be a fan of the top entrance, but went away from them because for comb honey, heat in the supers is important for getting the comb drawn quickly and evenly.

We rotated our comb boxes often and removed any that were close to complete promptly to reduce the hive volume as much as for any other reason, so we never had travel stain problems at all.

As I say, every area and every operation is different, so what worked for us might not work at all for another beekeeper in another area with a different goal or modus operandi.

As mentioned before, we used Ross Rounds, and they require different management than square sections, Hogg Half sections and cut comb.

One other drawback to top entrances -- the bees are used to coming and going from the top of a tall white thing (rather than near the ground), and when disassembling a hive, we found that we were the tall white thing nearest where they were accoustomed to returning 

As always, YMMV.


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## kenpkr (Apr 6, 2004)

Regarding the original question of whether the queen excluder = honey excluder, you may find the link below interesting. I find all of Walt Wright's articles informative but this one is written about this very topic in a convincing way.

http://www.beesource.com/pov/wright/bcjune06.htm


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## Allen Dick (Jan 10, 2009)

> this one is written about this very topic in a convincing way.


I'll say, very convincing, and typical of a style of traditional beekeeping writing that led me astray in my younger years and is still misleading young beekeepers today.

There is one part I believe, though.



> In conclusion: My objections to use of a queen excluder are based on personal observations that are, in most cases, both radical and subjective. Radical in the sense that they have not been examined by the academic world, and subjective in the sense that they are unproven deductions based on observation. Subjective, loosely translated, equates to opinion


.

Might be true somewhere, some time, but not in my world. 

Caveat emptor.

---

(Later) I got to thinking I had been uncharitable, and read it again. To me, it is still without merit, delivering absolute and demonstrably false conclusions created by using elaborate, flawed and overly theoretical reasoning.

Deductive reasoning works well to reach specific valid conclusions _if the premises are complete and correct_, but results in incomplete or incorrect conclusions if the premises are incorrect or incomplete. 

Not to say that there are not other issues, to me the primary basic and fatal fallacy in the article rests on the base assumption that more bees equals more honey. We all know, or should know, that beekeeping is simply not that simple, if we are talking about more honey in the drum. 

In fact the opposite may well be true in many cases. Population management and _timing_ is a big part of getting good crops, and excluders can be part of that management.

Enough on that. I started off previously saying, _"Queen excluders are one of the most common and most misunderstood pieces of bee equipment, ranking immediately after the smoker. Queen excluders are an expert tool, and as such are very useful to experts and a rather chancey for the majority of beekeepers"._

I have no problems understanding why many honestly consider them honey excluders and others honestly state that they get _more_ honey with excluders. There are simply too many factors and tricks of the trade to make blanket statements.

Since writing before, I had a few additional thoughts that might help some who have not yet mastered the excluder. 

I did not mention that I do not know any pros who use the wood-bound excluders that have been typically sold to beginners, except maybe in queen rearing.

There are several good reasons.

First, wood is fragile in commercial service, second, the wood-bound excluders I have seen have space above and below. Bees do not go through nearly as well if there is space top and bottom, they go through best when the excluder touches on either the top or the bottom, or preferrably both. A good varnishing by the bees and maybe a little burr comb help, too.

There are some things in beekeeping that are straightforward and obvious, and tools that are hard or impossible to misunderstand or to employ incorrectly, but they are few. Most beekeeping tools require a subtle understanding and study to perform optimally and are misused or underused by the majority of beekeepers who either have not taken the time to study them, or assume that they already know.

Consider the ubiquitous hive tool. How many beekeepers know how to use it properly?


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## tecumseh (Apr 26, 2005)

a snip from kenpkr highlighted article..

conclusion: My objections to use of a queen excluder are based on personal observations that are, in most cases, both radical and subjective. Radical in the sense that they have not been examined by the academic world, and subjective in the sense that they are unproven deductions based on observation. Subjective, loosely translated, equates to opinion.


tecumseh:
perhaps some folks need to review the academic literature a bit more throughtly... this might limit some purely speculative and somewhat UNTRUE statements posed as something informed. so yes the queen excluder impact on the hive has pretty well been examined*.

for a very long time I followed the advice of my mentor (who spent a lifetime chasing bees commercially from the Texas/Mexico Border to the the Canadian/Minnesota-North Dakota border) who speculated that a queen excluder was a honey excluder but (and first) also recognized (via long experience) that the fragile nature of the queen excluder didn't really make this piece of equipment very robust for commercial migratory purposes.

after review an old article in one of od franks old bee magazine two years ago I decided to test one yard following the guidelines of the article*. as the article suggested with appropriate entrance location (close the bottom entrance and add a top entrance and most importantly add one just above the excluder) the 'proper' use of an excluder created two direct effects. less backfilling in the lower brood nest and likely even more importantly less crowding in the broodnest by worker 'field' bees who no longer needed to pass through the brood nest to access the nectar storage area. my 'test' was conducted in a less than average nectar year here. the most direct results of the test was a subtatial increase in honey production (almost double that of a comparable yard a few miles away). a significant side benefit was 'no swarming' and 'for myself' you do not need to disturb the bottom brood nest during the honey production season.

so the test in question did pretty much ask the deeper question.... can't you teach an old dog new trick? well quite evidently sometimes yes.

*at this time I cannot recall (put my fingers on) the exact book and page of the old article I am referencing, but a prior search of 'like' topic article on this web sight should not only listed the reference but someone located and highlighted the article. a bit of a search (I could find it here if I thumbed through about 100# of od franks old bee magazines) should reveal the article in question.


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## Allen Dick (Jan 10, 2009)

Good comments. Glad I'm not alone in thinking the article at http://www.beesource.com/pov/wright/bcjune06.htm is high-sounding poppycock. I was thinking I should tread lightly, but it isn't really doing anyone favours. People need to know the truth.



> my mentor ...speculated ...the fragile nature of the queen excluder didn't really make this piece of equipment very robust for commercial migratory purposes.


That is actually true -- if the only excluder people know is the wood-bound ones. Wood-bound excluders fall apart easily. 

However, these days we buy excluders with steel-bound edges and no raised rim. They are bulletproof, figuratively speaking, and can be thrown, walked on and torn off the burr comb on brood chambers with little care and little permanent damage. (Did I mention driven over occasionally?)

_(Beware, if buying though, since, in Canada at least, there are several models that look alike, but one is comparatively weak and the other is the good one. I have forgotten which is which without seeing them. One was Jones and the other Mann Lake. The weaker one has two sides which are weker than the others. The good ones have the strong binding all around. I am sure Jean-Marc knows and will say)._

I have never tried the plastic excluders, but have heard some good things. We did use some of the old zinc excluders that were the thickness of the sheet of thin metal they were punched from. They may have been some of the best in some ways, but they had less open area, I think, restricting ventillation more, but the big drawback was the common belief that they wore the bees wings passing through. Since they were a bit sharp, that idea was very credible. I never did find out if it was true.

We also used five-mesh hardware cloth with good success, and tried the idea of turning excluders sideways or using excluders cut so that they covered the centre, and that there was a 1" to 2" open area all around. Neither of those ideas really worked out compared to using good ordinary steel excluders. 

_(Professional tip: When putting on excluders, don't be too neat. Put them so that they are a little off straight. That way, a little corner sticks out and can be grabbed by a gloved hand and lifted. If the excluder is on perfectly straight, an extra operation is necessary to get under the excluder -- using a hive tool to get a corner up to grab)._



> a significant side benefit was 'no swarming' and 'for myself' you do not need to disturb the bottom brood nest during the honey production season.


Exactly, and you know where the brood is. We found that having a well-defined brood nest was a big management aid and also improved wintering. My mentor used to say, "What is above the excluder is mine. What is below is theirs". That was using doubles. With singles, obviously, what is below is not sufficient often if _everything_ above is removed and they can starve immediately and catastropically unless fed or given a food chamber (kept from spring for that purpose) promptly.

Excluders also help isolate drug treated areas from non-treated areas of the hive and there is less occasion to be swapping frames from above and below.


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## beekinjax (Jan 7, 2009)

tecumseh:
(close the bottom entrance and add a top entrance and most importantly add one just above the excluder) 

Are you saying here that there are two entrances?
the one just above the excluder I understand.
Travis (Jesuslives) drills a 1 inch hole in the super that goes on the excluder. 
but where exactly is the other entrance? the 
'top entrance"?
is it at the top of the supers or the top of the brood chamber? 
if at the top of the supers how do the drones get out?
if at the top of the brood chamber how is the entrance made?
would you just drill a 1 inch hole in the top of the brood chamber also?
and if you did drill that hole and had two deeps for a brood chamber would it cause a problem when reversing the brood boxes to head off swarming?


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## tecumseh (Apr 26, 2005)

allend writes:
I was thinking I should tread lightly, but it isn't really doing anyone favours. People need to know the truth.
>exactly right. and thanks for your coments on how you use queen excluder. I had always wondered (doubts) about the side ways positioning of the excluder.

beeinjak writes:
Are you saying here that there are two entrances?
the one just above the excluder I understand.
Travis (Jesuslives) drills a 1 inch hole in the super that goes on the excluder. 
but where exactly is the other entrance? the 
'top entrance"?
is it at the top of the supers or the top of the brood chamber? 
if at the top of the supers how do the drones get out?
if at the top of the brood chamber how is the entrance made?
would you just drill a 1 inch hole in the top of the brood chamber also?
and if you did drill that hole and had two deeps for a brood chamber would it cause a problem when reversing the brood boxes to head off swarming?

tecumseh:
some clarification: part of the experiment of the article in question closed off the bottom entrance entirely, I simply installed a 'winter' time hive entrace cleat with a much reduced bottom entrance (a notch). I added wood shims above the excluder (which created a crack between the excluder and the first honey super) and my tops have a notched entrance built into them. so the test I performed (somewhat replicating the experiement of the article in question) did have three entrance. I don't drill holes in my boxes, although I don't see where the practice creates any great problems. the primary reason I added the notched entrance at the bottom was I had concerns in regards to the bees removing debris from the bottom board.

in regards to you last question in regards to reversing and any effect of drilled holes in the brood boxes... like I said I don't drill those little holes in my boxes so I am totally uncertain what effect (positive or negative) that they might create.


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## beekinjax (Jan 7, 2009)

Thanks for the clarification I understand now 
Is this a standard practice for you now?


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## Joel (Mar 3, 2005)

So I think we've pretty much answered the age old question then, once and for all, haven't we? Perhaps we could get this post published in ABJ AND BJ so the rest of the beekeeping world is as informed as we are!

The upper entrance we use is to simply jog the #2 honey super back about 1/4 inch.


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## Sundance (Sep 9, 2004)

Joel said:


> so the rest of the beekeeping world is as informed as we are!.


I shouldn't have been taking a drink when I read that
one!!!

We are truly, legends in our own minds.:thumbsup:


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## Barry (Dec 28, 1999)

allend said:


> However, these days we buy excluders with steel-bound edges and no raised rim. They are bulletproof, figuratively speaking, and can be thrown, walked on and torn off the burr comb on brood chambers with little care and little permanent damage. (Did I mention driven over occasionally?)


These are the kind I use. Is this what you're talking about?

http://s11.photobucket.com/albums/a184/CarolinaFilly/Beekeeping/?action=view&current=100_3047-1.jpg


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## Allen Dick (Jan 10, 2009)

Not exactly, but close. The ones we like have ends made exactly the same as the sides. These look pretty good, though.

Check out the ones at http://www.mannlakeltd.net/infopage.asp?idPage=18 
and 
http://www.jonesbee.com/hive.html

They don't have close-ups so it is hard to tell, but it is odd that Jones thinks their metal excluders "Lasts best if used where constant removal from colony is not required" and promote the wood-bound ones.

I know that the commercial beekeepers by metal bound ones by the pallet. We did.


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## Allen Dick (Jan 10, 2009)

Re: Number 45.

I have done pretty well all the same experiments, and run some of these configurations on a lot of hives for a year or more.

Imrie shims, special rims, auger holes, inner cover slits, staggering one super or all of them. I've also run two-queen hives, which by nature require upper entrances. Moreover, we have had many special boxes that provided upper entrances in almost any imaginable place on the hive, the result of knots, rots, dropping, woodpeckers, or bad construction.

As for conclusions? Well we were a commercial outfit with bees scattered over 100 miles and hired help, and in a country where it gets cold at night and sometimes for a week in summer, so don't take my word as gospel. It is what we learned for our situation.

We decided that upper entrances above the excluder neither helped nor hindered measurably for honey production, but added management problems. We also discovered that on cold nights drafts could cause the bees to leave the supers. Bees do not store well (for us at least) in areas of the hive they do not occupy 24/7, and also soon take honey out of cooler regions to brood chambers if they do and there is room below. We decided that the advantages and disadvantages of upper entrances cancelled out for us. That was particularly noticable in the case of weaker hives. So we quit using them.

However, we do maintain a 1" auger hole in every brood box, just below the handhole. That is very useful when splitting, since the box can sit on any flat surface and still have flight. We often just use a sheet of plastic on top of the parent hive as a cheap, easy to transport, temporary floor. 

Moreover, if all hive boxes are not the same colour, holes seem to be attractive to bees and drifting is less than with bottom entrances. Also, if the hives are uneven in a yard, weak hives tend to lose bees to stronger hives, since the stronger hives have entrance activity. With auger holes it is easier for weak hives to have bees at the entrance since the entrance is closer to the brood.


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## tecumseh (Apr 26, 2005)

beeinjax writes:
Is this a standard practice for you now?

tecumseh:
this was my test of the set up described in the bee journal which I performed last year. for the coming season those hives that I determine will be used for honey collection purposes here will be set up in this fashion.

joel writes:
Perhaps we could get this post published in ABJ AND BJ so the rest of the beekeeping world is as informed as we are!

tecumseh:
well the article (which I seem to reacall was titled almost exactly like this thread) has already been published about 20 years ago. not that the journals doesn't seem to mind reinventing the wheel about every 20 years or so.


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