beekeeping Beekeeping (or apiculture, from ) is the maintenance of bee colonies, commonly in artificial beehives. Honey bees in the genus '' Apis'' are the most commonly kept species but other honey producing bees such as '' Melipona'' stingless bees are ...

, a queen excluder is a selective barrier inside the

beehive A beehive is an enclosed structure which houses honey bees, subgenus '' Apis.'' Honey bees live in the beehive, raising their young and producing honey as part of their seasonal cycle. Though the word ''beehive'' is used to describe the nest of ...

that allows

worker bee A worker bee is any female bee that lacks the reproductive capacity of the colony's queen bee and carries out the majority of tasks needed for the functioning of the hive. While worker bees are present in all eusocial bee species, the term is rar ...

s but not the larger queens and drones to traverse the barrier. The bars have a distance of 4.2 millimeters. The barrier grid was probably invented around 1890. The purpose is to prevent the queen from moving from the brood chamber to the honey chamber. There she would lay her eggs between storage cells with honey, so that bee larvae or eggs would get into the honey during centrifuging. Queen excluders are also used with some queen breeding methods.

Design

Typically, the queen excluder is either a sheet of perforated metal or plastic or a wire grid in a frame with openings are limited to . Queen excluders can also be constructed of hardware cloth screen, of which #5 hardware cloth is often cited in references as sufficient for allowing worker bees to pass, but not queens.

Purpose

The intent of the queen excluder is to limit the queen's access to the

honey super A honey super is a part of a commercial or other human-managed beehive that is used to collect honey Honey is a sweet and viscous substance made by several species of bees, the best-known of which are honey bees. Honey is made and stor ...

s. If the queen lays eggs in the honey supers and a brood develops in them, it is difficult to harvest clean honey. It makes fall management more difficult. Queen excluders are removed in the

autumn Autumn, also known as fall (especially in US & Canada), is one of the four temperate seasons on Earth. Outside the tropics, autumn marks the transition from summer to winter, in September (Northern Hemisphere) or March ( Southern Hemisphe ...

; otherwise, the queen would not be able to move with the

winter cluster In beekeeping, a winter cluster is a well-defined cluster of honey bees that forms inside a beehive when the air temperature dips below . Honey bees are one of only a few kinds of insects that survive the winter as a colony. As the outside air t ...

and would die from exposure. A replacement queen can be difficult to introduce because the bees will not be accustomed to the new queen's

pheromone A pheromone () is a secreted or excreted chemical factor that triggers a social response in members of the same species. Pheromones are chemicals capable of acting like hormones outside the body of the secreting individual, to affect the behavio ...

s. New queens can be killed by the hive. Therefore, the death of a queen in winter is dangerous for a hive and can be expensive for a

beekeeper A beekeeper is a person who keeps honey bees, a profession known as beekeeping. The term beekeeper refers to a person who keeps honey bees in beehives, boxes, or other receptacles. The beekeeper does not control the creatures. The beekeeper ow ...

. Queen excluders are used with some queen breeding methods, especially as a way to allow queen cells to be built in the same hive with an existing queen, or as a way to house multiple queens in the same hive.

Reception

Opponents of the use of queen excluders claim that excluders lower honey quality, influence colony dynamics, and alter labour dynamics. A 2024 study found that queen excluders had no effect on colony dynamics, and did not reduce honey yield nor the amount of brood produced. Studies on honey quality and labour dynamics are ongoing.

References

{{BeeColonyMemberTypes Beekeeping tools Ukrainian inventions