  It has been argued that a black hole horizon can support the long range
fields of a Nielsen-Olesen string, and that one can think of such a vortex as
black hole ``hair''. In this paper, we examine the properties of an Abelian
Higgs vortex in the presence of a charged black hole as we allow the hole to
approach extremality. Using both analytical and numerical techniques, we show
that the magnetic field lines (as well as the scalar field) of the vortex are
completely expelled from the black hole in the extreme limit. This was to be
expected, since extreme black holes in Einstein-Maxwell theory are known to
exhibit such a ``Meissner effect'' in general. This would seem to imply that a
vortex does not want to be attached to an extreme black hole. We calculate the
total energy of the vortex fields in the presence of an extreme black hole.
When the hole is small relative to the size of the vortex, it is energetically
favoured for the hole to remain inside the vortex region, contrary to the
intuition that the hole should be expelled. However, as we allow the extreme
horizon radius to become very large compared to the radius of the vortex, we do
find evidence of an instability. This proves that it is energetically
unfavourable for a thin vortex to interact with a large extreme black hole.
This would seem to dispel the notion that a black hole can support `long'
abelian Higgs hair in the extreme limit. We show that these considerations do
not go through in the near extreme limit. Finally, we discuss whether this has
implications for strings that end at black holes.
