We had an interesting call in which a member said that the bees would not go through the queen excluder into the super. I have to say that this is a very unusual event. The bees normally move into the super with no trouble.
We gave some off-the-cuff suggestions which hopefully were of help, but as usual thought about the problem afterwards and now offer some more comments.
It is always hard to get a full picture of a situation in a brief conversation, and there is often not enough ‘thinking time’ in a phone call.
The brood box was described as ‘full’ with a queen excluder above it. We may well mean different things from each other by ‘full’.
1. Were all the cells full with either brood or honey so that the queen had nowhere to lay?
If this were the case, I would have expected the bees to have started to move into the super or be making swarming preparations (queen cells).
If the brood box was indeed really ‘full’ as defined above, a second brood box should be added at this stage to prevent an almost certain swarm, or the queen excluder could be removed and placed above the super to convert that super into a second brood box.
Or were there empty cells even though there were plenty of bees in the brood box? In this case I would let them move into the super in their own good time.
If the brood box is not ‘full’, it would not be a very good idea to place the queen excluder above the super to make it a half-brood, because the queen would probably go into it, and make her unnecessarily more difficult to find should you need to in the future. Also, the super (half brood) would end up containing brood as well as honey which couldn’t be harvested unless the box was placed above the queen excluder again later, so that the brood would hatch and the honey could then be taken – complicated – and the frame would have to be discarded, not stored over winter for future use as wax moths find any comb that has had brood in it.
I would welcome any input to this topic for all of our benefit and interest.
Geoff Cooper