A major supplier here in the UK had a problem with a faulty batch of QXs so it happens.
I hope you reported it to your supplier.
I did not report it. I thought it may have been user error or just a risk you take when using an excluder. I bought it several years ago, so I donât know that reporting it now would do much good. So I take it this is not the normal for an excluder.
Thatâs definitely not normal, can you measure the gap in mm/inches and post it here⌠I would put that excluder aside for the time being. Something is not right there.
Hi Dustin, your queen excluder could be fine. Are you sure itâs workers & not drones getting stuck in the QX. Any drones above the QX will try to get out & get stuck, exactly how you described.
Yes I get that quite a lot when the weather turns bad for a while in the summer and the only stores are in the supers.
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Wow, you certainly must have terrible weather at times. I must confess Iâve never noticed any drones getting stuck on the way up. If I find it I just run my hand over them to clear the QX & put it back. Itâs been quite a while since I did that. Whenever I put brood above the QX, I generally cut the drone comb out & let the bees repair it & fill it with honey.
I didnât pay attention to if they looked like drones or not, but I have a picture of it that isnât high quality enough to zoom in and get a good look at if they were drones. Any guesses? Iâll have to take a measurement of the gap size at some point. The excluder is tucked away somewhere in my garage.
Hi @dustin, going on the size of their eyes they look like drones to me. I can also see a number of worker bees on top of the excluder who do not appear to be getting stuck.
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+1 on those being primarily or completely drones.
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YesâŚall drones.
Were there stores in the super and NONE in the brood box?
This summer we had a drone laying queenâŚwe had the same thing happen. Usually drones hang out on the outer frames but they had been trying to get through the excluderâŚpossibly to get at stores in the super as there was a shortage of nectar at the time. Once we had a queen againâŚit all stopped as the drones eventually left the colony.
They are drones, the Qx looks fine. Thatâs the same type of QX I use. The only problem I have with them is the queen will find a gap & end up in the honey super, when that happens I remove it & look for the area the queen can fit through, once I find it, I full it up with Plasti-bond. After that, itâs good as gold⌠Man, thatâs a lot of drones in your hive. Iâd be doing something about that.
Iâve seen this before. QXâs are also Drone excluders. The drones need to be fed by the worker bees so they try to get up to where the honey is being stored.
Poor things, they just wanted a meal.
Thanks everyone! I feel better about trying the excluder on my hive again sometime. The last time I had it on (when this photo was taken) was May 2012, so I donât remember all the details of how much honey was stored and where. When I opened my hive and saw this, I was worried that my queen was one of the bees who had gotten stuck and died, so I gave up on using the excluder thinking it was a risk.
@JeffH Too many drones? Is this a problem? If it is, how to remedy?
Hi Greg, I would go through the brood & take the frames out that contain large amounts of drone comb. You only want frames in the brood with large amounts of worker comb & just a sprinkling of drone comb, maybe only about 5% drone comb. Take the frames you removed, cut the drone comb out & place them above the queen excluder for the worker bees to hatch & then let the bees use those frames for honey. The bees will repair the section you cut out. Just donât put 2 large cut out sections side by side, otherwise theyâll build bridging comb. Replace the frames you removed from the brood with nicely drawn worker comb or fresh foundation in a checkerboard fashion⌠PS Greg, if you keep bees in a SHB area, my strategy is worth taking notice of.
This is typical when you insert an excluder in the middle of a hive and one side does not have an exit (usually the top). The drones get stuck.
Itâs the colony that produces the drones, the queen merely lays the eggs. The colony makes lots of drones for one reason only: Reproduction. Every living thing wants to reproduce & pass on itâs genes. Bees are no exception. One way that a colony can have sex, reproduce, do their bit in the âbirds & the beesâ is via the many drones it produces. The more drones it can produce, the more chances it has of reproducing. The amount of drones that a colony wants to produce is less than ideal for our purposes.