Queen laying in the super
good call!!
I find the FBM amusing!
few little gems occasional he will spark an idea of how to do something in a different way!
Queen excluders... now only use them for queen rearing as I use a q+ method and would not want HM knocking off the young 'uns!
If she wants to lay in a super I let her... and rename it brood + 1/2
Cheers
I agree Icanhopit, although many disagree.
For me theres more than a couple of things i think about. Sometimes the queen is filling the middle section of the first and sometimes even the second super. If she lays in these upper sections, i dont mind, but the problem is that when we have harvest, and we have to harvest!!!!!!( before crystallisation), the supers are full of honey and 3 to four frames of brood!!( but this does depend on the year and flow)
What do you do with the brood. Some say extract it and put it back on and it hatches out still after extraction??? Well i didn't try this but i will next i year!! surely severely deformed bees? I has anyone tried this!!!
I thought about this problem of spare brood for a few weeks and then after looking at "Queen rearing in the sustainable apiary" for the nine millionth time, it dawned on me that instead of harvesting brood i could easily harvest brood from supers and use this as extra brood going in to my cell builder, You have to be organised and collect up brood, make a decision about what you would harvest for honey and what you would harvest for brood. Once you've made that decision you simply select a hive in the apiary and put all the supers full of brood above an excluder. Thats your free resource that might have otherwise been wasted.
Re queen Barrier, I didn't use one at all this year and yes i did have a fair bit of brood in my supers (as i explained above) but our spring nectar flow was so strong that mostly bees went up with lots of nectar faster than the queen could lay so we got a great harvest.
My colleague who has mostly Buckfast genetics in his colonies, does use excluders and he claims that his bees dont mind going through an excluder, whereas i would say that our local AMM generally hate a queen barrier and your better off without it, as the bees won't go through it.
Whats better, Honey in your supers and some brood, or your bees hanging from the trees!! (Quote Michael Palmer)
Theres no doubt in my mind that all colonies need to have a queen with unlimited access to all parts of the hive, its up to us to work around this! I feel it creates more trouble than its worth!! Other opinions will differ for sure!
Summer is not a problem for us, as generally the queen reduces her laying and most brood hatches out, just before the harvest and often you can see two layers in the supers where brood was and has been replaced later on, making two clear different flavours of honey in each comb!! interesting!
One thing i will say that is a benefit of using an excluder is that it allows using a bee escape more effectively. If you have brood and you put a bee escape beneath a super with brood the bees are less reluctant to leave!, well thats what we found!
but I can't take anyone seriously who recommends emergency cells for queen raising
