Paradise Honey EPS Queen Trap System with plastic queen excluder and its own entrance

01 · QUEEN FIRST, THEN THE ENTRANCE

The order matters

At the start of the flow you move the queen into the lower box. Before fitting the system you have to close that box's entrance: if the queen is upstairs when you close it, you have trapped nothing.

Once the set is on, the hive has a new flight entrance between the two boxes. The workers come and go through it, cross the excluder to feed the queen and tend the brood, and carry the nectar up to the supers.

02 · IT DOESN'T PREVENT, IT HOLDS

What it actually does

The system does not switch off the swarming urge: the colony goes on building queen cells. What it does is make sure the queen cannot leave, so when the swarm goes out and cannot find her, it comes home and carries on foraging.

And that is where the real gain lies, and it is not that the bees «focus»: a colony that swarms loses half its foragers in the middle of the flow. Holding the swarm is keeping the strength for the crop.

03 · DRONES DON'T PASS THE EXCLUDER

The consequence to plan for

A queen excluder does not let drones through either: their thorax is wider than a worker's. With the lower entrance closed, the drones that hatch in the bottom box stay in there for as long as the trapping lasts.

So it pays to take out the drone brood before fitting it — which is a textbook varroa trap anyway, since the mite prefers it — and not to stretch the trapping beyond the swarming weeks.

04 · WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

Reopening, and the virgin queen

Once swarming is over and the queen is laying again, you reopen the lower entrance. If a virgin queen has hatched, opening it is what lets her out on her mating flights; about two weeks later she will start to lay.

It is not unusual for the old and the young queen to live alongside each other for a while. And with the system fitted, closing the entrance for a move is still easy, so migratory work is not complicated by it.

05 · REPLACE THE QUEENS THAT SWARMED

The underlying decision

A colony that has tried to swarm will try again, and so will her daughters: the tendency is inherited. The system saves your season, but it does not fix the genetics.

The recommendation is to replace, before the following season, the queens that tried to swarm and those raised from them. Otherwise the same job comes round every spring.

06 · BEFORE YOU BUY

This is the complete system: