Menna cage excluder

01 · WHY CAGE HER

With no capped brood, the treatment reaches every mite

With the queen shut in, the colony stops laying and, after a few weeks, there is no capped brood left. That changes the outcome of a treatment: the mites that were hiding inside the cells are now on the bees, exposed to the acaricide. And there is a second benefit that gets little use — with no brood to hide them, the count afterwards tells you what the treatment really did.

02 · THE SIZE

47 cm is Dadant Blatt, not Langstroth

It is the question we get most, so it belongs in the first line: the frame is 47 cm long, the Dadant Blatt size. In a Langstroth, whose top bar is longer, the frame does not hang from the rebates and ends up on the floor of the hive. And once inside, it goes in the middle of the nest, never at the edges: the queen needs the warmth of the centre, just as brood does.

03 · HOW IT IS USED

A side lid to put her in, three openings to let her out

Open the side lid, put the queen in and close it. To release her you do not have to dismantle anything or handle her again: the frame has three openings that you open the day you decide she should lay again. The same thing serves to leave a colony queenless in a controlled way when you are raising queens.

04 · WHY A FRAME AND NOT A SMALL CAGE

Room, pheromone and a little more money

It costs more than a pocket cage, and what you buy with the difference is room: the queen moves over a whole surface, her pheromone spreads through the nest and the workers attend her through the grid, so the block is less traumatic for the colony. The trade-off is the price and the space it takes — one frame less of nest while the confinement lasts.

05 · BEFORE YOU BUY

The frame weighs about 400 g and comes on its own: the queen is yours to add. It is 47 cm long, so check your hives are Dadant Blatt before ordering.