I

ANNO 5 Numero 1
Aulo Manino, Marco Porporato e Augusto Patetta [1]

Effect of the use of queen excluders on hive growth and honey production

[1]Di.Va.P.R.A. – Entomologia e Zoologia applicate all’Ambiente “Carlo Vidano” - Università degli Studi di Torino - via Leonardo da Vinci 44, 10095 Grugliasco (Torino)

Corresponding author: augusto.patetta@unito.it

The queen excluders is a beekeeping tool used to confine the queen in a part of the hive without preventing the workers’ normal activity; placed between the nest and the super, it avoids the presence of brood in the latter, making thus honey extracting operations easier, but it may hinder the storage of honey in the super increasing its accumulation in the nest. For this reason the use of queen excluders is often a matter of debate among beekeepers.

Given the poor number of experimental studies on this topic, it seemed opportune to verify the influence of queen excluders on honey production and hive management.
In the years 2004 and 2005 two groups of eight families in 10-comb Dadant-Blatt hives for migratory beekeeping were compared with as many families without queen excluders. For each family the total amount of processed honey was weighed and, from April to October, the number of adult bees, of worker and drone brood cells, of queen cells, of pollen cells, and the quantity of honey in the nest were evaluated every fortnight. The results were submitted to two-way variance analysis.

The climatic conditions in both experimental years determined modest and statistically insignificant differences between the values obtained in 2004 and 2005 for all the parameters considered. The comparison between the results obtained in the hives with queen excluders and the control ones did not show statistically significant differences for the growth of the families and honey production, while honey stores were more in the hives with queen excluders and pollen stores were more in the control hives.

Considering this experimentation, we can affirm that the use of queen excluders does not interfere either with the growth of the family or with honey production; however, as it may cause a partial block of the brood, it may need a greater care in managing the colonies, but this inconvenient seems greatly balanced both by the remarkable labour saving in honey extracting operations and by a production of a higher quality honey.