28 DADANT SYSTEM OF BEEKEEPING 



able. Yet they are still an obstruction to the free passage 

 of air and to the active travel of bees over the combs. Besides, 

 they are expensive, easily put out of service, and are often glued 

 by the bees in such fashion as to make their removal difiiicult. 

 We do not use them, for these reasons and the following : 



With the large, deep hives, it is rare to have the queen ascend 

 into the upper story, unless she is seeking for drone-comb in 

 which to lay and cannot find any in her brood apartment. But 

 if there is no drone-comb in the upper story — and there need 

 not be any if we have used comb-foundation, she will have no 

 inducement to move to the upper story. If she goes there acci- 

 dentally, she will go back to the lower story readily for the 

 very reason, already mentioned, that a queen likes to lay eggs 

 on large combs where the laying is not interrupted by the ob- 

 stacles of top and bottom bars and bee-spaces. 



It is well, however, to say to the reader that bees do nothing 

 invariably and that there will be queens and occasions, even in 

 large hives, when there will be brood reared in the upper story. 

 But the quantity of this will be so limited that it will never be 

 profitable to use queen-excluders. This again was tested by us 

 on an extensive scale. 



In the production of comb-honey, with small hives, on a 

 commercial scale, the excluder is often necessary, for without it 

 the queen may ascend into the comb-honey supers, lay eggs in 

 a few of the cells and thus spoil the looks and the value of the 

 honey for market. With our management, the production of 

 extracted honey and large brood-chambers, we have but one 

 term to describe the queen-excluder. It is a nuisance, rarely 

 necessary with our system. 



