Queen Excluder - National or Commercial

Plastic queen excluder to suit commercial and national hives. Please not that colour may differ from picture. The intent of the queen excluder is to limit the queen's access to the honey supers. If the queen lays eggs in the honey supers and a brood develops in them it is difficult to harvest clean honey. It makes fall management more difficult. Queen excluders are removed in the autumn; otherwise, the queen would not be able to move with the winter cluster and would die from exposure. A replacement queen can be difficult to introduce because the bees will not be accustomed to the new queen's pheremones. New queens can be killed by the hive. Therefore, the death of a queen in winter is dangerous for a hive and can be expensive for a beekeeper.