Queen Excluders (10-Frame)

Keep the queen in the brood chambers by using a queen excluder. This selective barrier inside the beehive allows the worker bees, but not the larger queens and drones, to traverse the barrier.

Queen excluders are sometimes used with some queen breeding methods, but are more often than not are utilized to help limit the queen’s access to the supers. If the queen lays eggs in the honey supers and a brood develops in them, it can be difficult to extract clean honey from the hive.

Note: Queen excluders are usually removed in the fall; otherwise, the queen would not be able to move with the winter cluster and she would die from exposure.