I was wondering how many of you choose to use a queen excluder and if not, how do you harvest honey with brood?
Queen excluder or not
We choose to use a queen excluder. Here is a link, however, with some suggestions for keeping the queen from laying eggs in the supers without using an excluder: http://www.honeybeesuite.com/the-queen-excluder-controversy-some-things-never-change/
Hope this helps!
I was wondering how many of you choose to use a queen excluder and if not, how do you harvest honey with brood?
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dhoom
This message was edited Dec 26, 2014 5:39 AM
Did not use them.
We ran Langstroth boxes, full depth for all the supers.
Harvested 100% of the boxes from 4th story on up, queen never went that high.
Had to go through the 3rd story pretty carefully, sometimes she would get into it. Usually we would simply move those frames to another hive that might not be doing so good, might benefit from some extra brood.
By the time fall came they were moving back down again, and filling any cells that used to have brood with honey, so we could pretty much take that 3rd box, too. Get them back down into 2 boxes for the winter.