Hello All,
I am one of those beekeepers that believes in benefits of excluders, but
never quite got the hang of using them.  Some may argue, but I think there
is an art to using them and I have not figured it out.  I have tried them
many times in the past.  Some colonies went through them as if they were not
there, others treated them as a brick wall.  In the later case they would
store honey in the brood chamber and end up swarming.  I still use some
every year, but usually for management reasons, (two queens, etc.).

A number of years ago I read an article by Roger Morse on their use.  He
recommended using them 3 to 4 weeks prior to honey removal.  The idea being
any brood in the honey supers will hatch and not be there during harvesting.
You are, however, still left with brood stained frames.  These are the
primary targets for the wax moth during storage. Basically I don't think it
is worth the effort.  I did use a modified version of this during mid summer
I would chase the queen down to the bottom brood chamber and place an
excluder over her.  The brood in the upper chamber would hatch and the bees
would begin to store honey.  This ensured ample winter stores.  I no longer
do this because of mite treatment.  I take the honey off in mid summer and
they store the fall flow as winter stores.

I also read an article a number of years ago where a beekeeper used a
modified inner cover as a queen excluder.  I have not tried it, but it
seemed like it may work.  You basically take an inner cover and close the
existing hole in the center and drill a number of 1/2 inch holes around the
outer edge.  The workers will pass through without problem but the queen who
"usually" is in the center will not.  The article went on to state that this
was a good way to store supers.  After extraction empty supers can be placed
above this board and the bees will clean them out.  Then in the spring if a
colony is expanding rapidly there is room for them to grow.  (Allen has
mentioned in few posts of giving them extra space that they will use but not
on a regular basis.)  The folks at Betterbee recommend using an excluder
sideways giving the workers a few inches of un restricted space.

I have not tried doing either yet they make sense.  However I believe that
for a queen to stay in one place we need to give her what she wants; empty
comb.  IMHO that includes drone comb.  I have had (what I believe happened)
a queen cross two supers of full/capped honey and lay eggs in drone cells on
burr comb.  She was not interested in the worker cells only drone.  As a
side note, if there is sufficient drone comb available, I also noticed that
repairs to damaged comb, which usually results in drone comb, are repaired
using worker cells.  There are probably a number of factors that influence
this but it seems to be when we give the bees what they need rather than
what we think they need, they will do better.

I still wish I could use excluders effectively.

Ron Bogansky
Kutztown, PA



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