I have drones in my honey super. Queen excluder is not damaged. How do I get them out and back into the brood box?
Hello and welcome to the Flow forum!
The easiest thing to do is create an upper exit for them. I have an inner cover with a notch cut out of it which can be used for that purpose. If you don’t have that, and you don’t want to cut into your inner cover, you can prop it up with a stick or something similar in the morning, and by the mid-afternoon, the drones should all have left. You need the gap to be at least 6mm for them to get out.
I definitely recommend inspecting the super though. If you have drones up there, it is extremely likely that you have drone brood up there. As they emerge, you are going to have to release them, or they will kill themselves trying to get down through the queen excluder. Drone brood in the super can only come from one of two things. Either the queen is in the super (despite the excluder) or you have laying workers. The most likely in most cases is that the queen got through the excluder. What type do you have - plastic, metal or wood?
Plastic. But it will be replaced with a metal one on Thursday. Your explanation is certainly a possibility but I did an inspection 2 weeks ago and there were no drones in the super then and the queen was in the brood box. The drones were all at the bottom of the super so I levered up the rear of the super and created a gap for them to exit. Left it for a couple of hours and will check again on Thursday. Also honey has been removed from uncapped cells. Perhaps the workers were feeding them.