The queen excluder is a flat slotted piece that has slots big enough for the worker bees to pass through but not the queen bee. Beekeepers use the queen excluder to prevent the queen bee to go to the honey supers and lay eggs. This way the beekeeper can have frames filled only with honey. Each Apimaye beehive set already comes with a queen excluder.
How to Use Queen Excluder
When your colony has at least 2 boxes of honey and brood, it is time to add a honey super on top of your hive.
- Just pick up the top cover and the top feeder of your Apimaye hive
- Place the queen excluder on top of the deep super
- Make sure you use the bottom slot for the latch when using the excluder.
- Put the top feeder and hive cover back on
Alternative UsesThe queen excluder can be used to prevent swarming if you find your bees ready to take off. Bees need their space. A queen bee lays 1500 to 2000 eggs a day and the colony keeps growing. If the hive becomes too crowded, they'll get ready to swarm. Just put a new super on top. If you don't have one ready, find the queen and place it on a box that's above the queen excluder and make sure the circular round entrance is only in the "honey bee" mode. This way the queen won't be able to get out of the hive. This will only buy you some time so you should add a super on top as soon as possible.
An alternative is to use the queen excluder to have 2 weak colonies at the same Apimaye bee hive system. This way you can have 2 colonies with 2 queens in the same hive. They would be both at the lowest box of the hive. Make sure to take out the pollen trap, and add the division board on the lowest box. The division board should go through the grooves at the bottom board so there is no space for bees to pass underneath. Set the division board circular holes to the ventilation settings, this way the odor will pass through the division board but bees can not. Therefore you will have 2 queen system with the similar hive odor. Then you should place a queen excluder and place a common super. Since the queens can't touch each other they will not fight.