What is a queen excluder? In simple terms, a queen excluder is a perforated barrier placed between the brood chamber and the honey super that prevents the queen from entering the honey super and laying eggs. The brood chamber is the part of the hive that the queen is confined to raise brood or baby bees.
For many beekeepers a queen excluder is of their most important beekeeping supplies which assists the beekeeper manage the hive better. A queen excluder allows the queen to stay on the brood frames, on the lower part of the hive.
A queen excluder is a barrier made of metal or plastic. It is a flat grid with holes that only worker bees can squeeze through—like a fence for keeping out queen bees. A mated and laying queen bee has a larger thorax than the smaller worker bees and cannot get through.
Lack of brood and eggs
So, when the queen is absent, eggs will be the first thing to go missing. For this reason, beekeepers should always check for eggs during inspections to confirm the presence of a queen. A colony that has been queenless for longer will also lack larvae or capped brood.
The nurse bees will go through the excluder in order to care for the brood. However, if you use this method you have to periodically move brood into the upper box and give the queen new places to lay her eggs. If you don't manage the two boxes, overcrowding in the queen's box may induce swarming.
The main purpose of the queen excluder is to prevent the queen bee from entering honey supers. Boxes near the top of the hive stack are meant to be the honey harvest for the beekeeper. If allowed free range, the queen honey bee will often move up into the honey supers and lay eggs.
Vertical split
This is a way of splitting the hive where you don't need to find the queen. We can call it a vertical split, using another brood box and a queen excluder.
By the time the candy plug has been eaten through, the queen will have become accepted within the hive. It is very important to wait one week before opening your hive after installing the new queen.
A queenless colony may only survive between 6 and 8 weeks if the remaining bees cannot raise a new queen. If a new queen cannot be raised in time, likely, the colony will slowly collapse as the worker bees age and die off without new generations to replace them.
A virgin queen bee will never mate inside of her own hive as she needs to take flight to mate. By mating during flight, a queen bee is able to increase the odds that she will mate with drones that did not originate from her own colony, and thereby minimize the chances of inbreeding appearing in the next generation.
If a queen bee is killed, the worker bees try to raise a new queen by feeding select larvae royal jelly. The first emerging queen eliminates rivals and mates with drones to continue the colony. If a new queen cannot be raised, the colony will eventually decline in population and die out.
Older worker bees will reject queens that they are not familiar with and tend to view them as a colony invader, even when they have no hope of raising a new queen on their own. This is especially true if the queen is unmated, or not well-mated, with numerous drones from unrelated colonies.
With two brood boxes, there is enough space for your queen to lay as many eggs as she can. This means you won't need to check your hives as often. When using one brood box, there is only enough room to feed your broods sugar syrup in small increments. With two, you can give them larger amounts less often.
Will a queen excluder prevent swarming? Like removing queen cells, placing a queen excluder at the bottom of the brood box or along the entrance won't prevent, nor stop, a colony's urge to swarm, but can similarly give you some time to perform a split soon.
By having two prolific queens laying simultaneously, the total colony population can reach over 100,000 bees, while the population of a single-queen colony generally tops out around 60,000 bees. This can lead to enormous forces of foragers capable of producing large honey crops when nectar is available.
As beekeepers discovered long ago, a single colony with two queens generally builds a large population of bees and can produce abundant excess honey.
Nurse bees will select 10 to 20 newly hatched female larvae and begin feeding them a strict diet of royal jelly, a milky white substance that be bees secrete from the tops of their heads. The exclusive diet of royal jelly turns on the female larva's reproductive system, turning her into a queen.
Each hive has one queen, and 100 female worker bees for every male drone bee. The queen's only job is to lay eggs and a drone's job is to mate with the queen.
However, there can (typically) only be one queen bee in a hive, so when the new queens hatch they must kill their competitors. A newly hatched queen will sting her unhatched rivals, killing them while they are still in their cells. If two queens hatch at once, they must fight to the death.
If the queen for some reason does not join them, then they will all return to the hive from whence they came. This is unusual however. The queen usually emerges with the swarm and lands on the tree or bush along with the rest of the bees.
Some beekeepers place a queen excluder under a brood box after hiving a captured swarm onto undrawn foundation. This helps prevent the colony from absconding while the bees draw some comb. After that the queen will start laying and the risk of the swarm disappearing is much reduced.
If honey is not harvested from the hive, they will eventually run out of space to not only make more honey, but also for the queen to lay eggs. When this happens, your colony will swarm and you will lose a majority of your bees.
Clipping performed by an inexperienced beekeeper can end in disaster, especially if the beekeeper accidentally nicks the thorax or snips a leg. It can happen so fast! So leave your queen intact and find some other way to reduce swarming.