Q: Exclusions Cages
As I prepare for the upcoming season, I have bought some exclusion cages to hold my queens. My goal is to use them for 14-day brood breaks to help control Varroa, followed by oxalic acid treatment. However, I am wondering if these cages might also be suitable for banking mated queens within the same colony. Do you have any recommendations or references on this?
Marie-Hélène Majeau
Canada, November
A
I can think of three types of exclusion cages. Correspondingly, I will answer the question three ways, one for each exclusion cage type, given I am not sure which type you are referencing in your question. First, though, I need to define “banking a queen” for the benefit of the readers.
Banking a queen refers to confining the queen, usually in a combless setting, for a period during which she is not needed. Beekeepers bank queens to have them available in times of need. Queen producers do this regularly. For example, they may produce hundreds or thousands more queens than they can sell at a given time point. In these cases, they bank the queens to have for future orders. They do this by caging the queens individually, bulking the queen cages (usually in a specially designed frame that accommodates queen cages), and placing those cages in a very strong colony. The bees in the colony will tend the queens through the wire mesh on the face of the queen cage. The banked queens do not have the opportunity to lay eggs, given they are confined to an area devoid of wax comb. Of course, beekeepers can bank queens in other ways, but the central premise of banking is to confine a queen such that workers can tend her, keeping her alive until she is needed. Now, let me discuss this with three exclusion cage types in mind:
- One type of exclusion cage is a cage in which you can place an entire deep frame. Typically, beekeepers use this cage to confine a queen to a single frame. That way, the queen lays only on one frame and enjoys greater mobility than what she would have with the other two types of exclusion cages. Most of these cages are made from queen excluder material. This allows the workers to pass through the cage walls, tend the queen, feed the brood, and engage in other tasks. After three weeks, the only brood present in the nest would be that on the frame to which the queen is confined.
In your case, when using these excluder cages, I assume you would allow the colony’s queen to remain free-running in the nest, while banking other queens on single frames in the exclusion cages. I do not think this is a useful way to bank queens because it does not really fit the spirit of banking a queen. Is she really banked if she is running freely on a comb …
