Queen Excluder

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 pheromones. 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.

Queen excluders are used with some queen breeding methods, especially as a way to allow queen cells to be built in the same hive with an existing queen, or as a way to house multiple queens in the same hive