Peter Borst said "Still, being able to use the same frames for honey or
brood is handy."

Peter, as you know, commercial beekeepers here abouts pretty exclusively use
excluders to keep the queens out of honey frames.  Some do it so they don't
have to mess with brood while extracting, and some because they think that
if our (sometimes) fine spring/early summer light honey gets put in black
comb it will darken the honey.

Disadvantages of using excluders include a greater tendancy of the bees to
swarm (unless the brood nest is very large), and in years with a slow
trickle of honey the bees will tend to pack the brood nest and never get
into the supers.  This year was one of those for myself.  I have been always
using excluders on my extracting hives, and never using them on my comb
honey hives.  My brood nest is usually a deep and a medium, so is fairly
restricted.

I ran across a commercial guy this year (1,000 hives) that runs the same
brood nest as I do, but in late April he puts on two drawn mediums with no
excluders.  Then in mid-June he runs the bees (including the queen) out of
the supers with a repellent, puts an excluder under the lower medium, and
adds another super or two.  He claims this controls his swarming and since
he first pulls supers in early August it lets him have brood-free frames for
extracting.  He also claims that putting light honey in black cells has no
effect on the honey color.  "The color of the nectar that goes into the cell
is the color of the honey that comes out".

Were you able to get light honey from your dark frames in California?  Do
you think the light honey stored in dark cells got darkened?

Lloyd


-- 
Lloyd Spear
Owner Ross Rounds, Inc.
Manufacture of equipment for round comb honey sections,
Sundance Pollen Traps, and producer of Sundance custom labels.
Contact your dealer or www.RossRounds.com

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