Spring Beekeeping. Queen Exluders.

 It looks like Blogger has combined all my blogs,  so reading about bees and bikes ...

Anyway! My Merewether bees have ramped up their collective presence these past weeks. There has been a feaux swarm and a bit of aggro. So after a few "emergency" calls from my sister I needed to get to the bottom of it.  

Adding Supers is a stock response to the Spring Expansion.  The bees,  like the flowers are growing and being more productive and need space to store nectar.  So steps one and two,  were to add supers and extract honey.  This was for all for hives. But this didn't solve the crowding issue and there was still some major bearding of #2. 

So,  I read up on Queen Exluders. Truthfully,  i cannot recall exactly why i twigged to this,  I guess it was just intuition? Once I'd read how some Bee'k's refer to then as Honey Excluders and how Workers are reluctant to pass through them and tend to ashore too much honey in the Brood Chamber,  my mind was made up to REMOVE ALL QUEEN EXLUDERS. 

Bee Prison.  For the Drones it's Death Row.

On the job,  I discovered that #1 & 3 had no QEs & immediately remembered having an experience last year when a Queen was trapped above the QE. So, #2 & 4 only needed attention.  2 went okay, it was busy,  the Brood Chamber probably needed work to open up the  passages due to burr comb,  but the bees were not happy, so we whipped out the QE and closed it up for a week.  

Now,  here's a good example of intuition.  I'm not psychic nor a very experienced apiarist. I just had an idea that the BC in 4, might be empty.  Sure enough,  there were tumbleweed rolling through the frames and not only that,  the QE was a site of carnage as the carcasses of a hundred Drones lay wedged in,  facing downwards as they forlornly tried to escape.  No wonder there was unrest inn the place.  I won't say what I thought of QEs in that moment,  but i viewed to never touch them again. 

In my research I also learned that BEES NEED EXTRA ROOM FOR BROOD IN SPRING. Its self evident now I know it. But my Mentor didn't tell me this.  Why? Well essentially for commercial reasons,  he split hives rather than let them expand.  For him,  a new hive was $250 cash.  

So another lesson,  that I was already aware of: COMMERCIAL MOTIVES DETERMINE MUCH OF THE BEEKEEPERS WORK. Queen Exluders and Splits are really about maximum exploitation ofoffends,  not tending bees.

So I picked up a good few lessons already this spring.  I did learn about the QE last year,  but didn't have the confidence or conviction to lock it into my normal practice. But hopefully I will heed the lessons this year.