Mistakes and interventions

Today I sorted out the queen excluder issues in Hive D. It wasn't pretty.

I have made mistakes. A surprising proportion have been to do with the use of queen excluders. This time I had left the excluder out and found brood in the super above the capacious brood box.

Eleven days ago I put the excluder back in, making sure that the queen was in the bottom box. I looked later and found that a substantial proportion of the brood were Drones. The Drones don't fit through a queen excluder so they'd need to be taken out later. I also found a Queen cell. A virgin queen above an excluder might lead to all sorts of issues. A swarming colony leaves with the mature queen, expecting their newly hatched queen(s) to mate and take over. If she's trapped above the excluder they might swarm whilst she is unable to mate.

I took the super frames out one by one and shook them above the entrance. When I was finished there was a puddle of milling bees in front of the hive, including quite a few drones. I hope that they'll make it in. During the transfer I deliberately destroyed the Queen Cell. I'm unhappy about that. I also removed a frame which had several dozen Drone Cells. I'm also unhappy about that.

I am supposed to be a low intervention bee keeper. This means trusting the bees and allowing them to organise their hives as they wish. I hope that the intervention of having a Queen Excluder is balanced by using a Commercial box which gives a very large comb area for brood. The harvest which the excluder makes possible will be, I hope, a genuine surplus. Opening the hive regularly and changing its' configuration is not low intervention. Today was a disappointment.