Hey everyone. As I mentioned in the 'welcome' post above, I am very new/inexperienced to the beekeeping game and inadvertently ran into some questions about what is evidently one of the biggest debates between us today: Queen excluders.
I have no familial/generational experience with beekeeping and have been relying primarily on books and youtube videos to get by with how to care for the hive. The beginning of this season, we had 2 very well developed deep broods and decided it was time to attempt our first honey super. Since we were relying on the books, we went with the excluder. We placed in excluder as directed and I understood the intent behind it.
The issue is, after about a month, the bees had not laid any groundwork for comb at all! We were confused and frustrated. It was as if they were refusing to comb out frames without the queen first 'scenting' the area. There were 3-4 dozen workers and drones porching in and around the honey super and roof, so it was not like they couldn't get there.
So we took the excluder out.
The results were unreal. Within 2 weeks, not only had all the frames been combed out, but half of them were filled completely with honey. The other half were a mix of honey and brood. We took the honey only ones for a small harvest.
I guess my question is: Is it normal that the queen 'self segregates' some zones JUST for honey, and some for both honey and brood? I was even more confused about the efficacy and necessity of the queen excluders after this.
After the harvest, we put the drained frames back in the hive. Am I to expect that those frames will continue to be zoned for "just honey"? That seems unlikely to me. Maybe the queen just hadn't gotten to that area yet?
Please let me know about any tips or ideas you have. I want to get a honey harvest for sure but don't want to risk killing a generation of bees to do it. The queen excluder seemed to keep bees from developing the area, but leaving it out lets the queen, or more specifically MY queen, lay eggs in around half of the frames.