Last week had a great little queenless builder that cranked out some beautiful cells. I pulled the cells Wednesday and swapped in a fresh bar for them to build. As I was closing up the nuc I thought I had heard some queen pipping but there are some mating nucs pretty close so I just proceeded to close the nuc up and move on.
I took a quick peak yesterday and of course the cells were all trashed….look at entrance and realized I had forgotten the Queen excluder….start to look at the frames and sure enough a beautiful freshly mated queen.
Great reminder to keep your builder queen excluders on and to try and keep mating and builder yards separate!
American Heritage Apiary 