Josh writes:
"One difference is that we are using a queen excluder on the Italian
hive, again just as an experiment."
Josh,
There's lots of stuff on this in the archives. I have had mixed results
using queen excluders. This spring when I went to put supers on I left the
excluders off to get the bees to start working up there. I did this to
three fairly strong Italian hives and one strong Carniolan hive. After
they had started occupying the supers, I made sure the queens weren't in
them and inserted the queen excluders. About a week and a half later I
looked into the hives. The bees had pretty much abandoned the supers and
the brood chambers were full of swarm cells. I should mention that I had
noticed earlier that workers were struggling to get through the bars of the
excluder.
I have a feeling the QE's had something to do with encouraging the swarm
response or at least in negating the benefit of adding the supers. I can't
answer the question about old brood comb discouraging the storing of honey,
but right now I'm feeling pretty negative about queen excluders.
Steve Noble
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