A Spring Day amongst the Bees

The first substantive job for a beekeeper in the spring is to ensure that the colony of bees, which is now beginning to expand quite rapidly, has sufficient room.

This is where an additional box called a super is added to the top of the hive. It contains nine or ten frames in which the bees can shortly store honey.

The neat storage of honey can only be achieved if the queen bee is kept out of the super. This is the job of the queen excluder. The queen bee is considerably larger the worker bees and the queen excluder, which is the wired frame that can be seen, will only allow the worker bees to pass through it.

This principle has been known for a hundred years or so. It must have been a very astute person who actually worked out the size of the mesh in the queen excluder.