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Queen Excluders on top bar hives

 
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I want to install a queen excluder(homemade) in my tb hive.  Where do I put it?
 
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What type of hive?
 
steward
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what are you trying to accomplish?
 
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I'm not sure it's possible to put a queen excluder on a top bar hive. Does such a thing exist? Based on your other posts that appears to be your style of hive.
 
wayne fajkus
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Mike Barkley wrote:I'm not sure it's possible to put a queen excluder on a top bar hive. Does such a thing exist? Based on your other posts that appears to be your style of hive.



Yes. Its a piece of plywood thats also a top bar. It covers the full interior outline of the box. Mine has a hole in it that can be covered to make the other side inaccessible. An extruder can be put over the hole. It can be open, closed, or exclude queen.

Im going in my hive today. I'll snap a pic.
 
pollinator
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I've read about people putting a honey supper on top of a top bar and using an excluder to keep the queen out.
 
wayne fajkus
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Here are the pics. Easy enough to exlude any percentage of the hive depending on where you put it. At least thats my thought. Its my first year so i am in rookie mode....
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A queen excluder is not typically part of a top bar hive, because they are operated under totally different principals compared to typical box hives (langstroth, national etc...).

In a Langstroth:
The beekeeper harvests whole boxes of frames at once. They don't want brood in any of those honey frames, so the queen excluder is used to keep the queen in the lower boxes, while the workers fill and cap the honey frames above.

In a top bar hive:
the beekeeper harvests bar-by-bar. You lift a bar, look at it, and decide if it is ready to harvest. If it has brood it is returned and left for another time. During harvesting the whole comb is cut from the bar, before being returned to the bees. There is no need for a queen excluder in such a system.
 
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