One year I ran an bit of an experiment on queen excluders.   I installed 
16  2lb packages on drawn foundation the end of April with enough honey 
to get them started.   I randomly chose half of them to run with 
excluders (actually rolled dice) and half ran without excluders.   All 
boxes added to the hive also had drawn comb.   Come harvest time, I 
numbered the hives and the supers pulled from each hive and weighed each 
before and after uncapping and extracting.  I threw out the hive that 
produce the highest and lowest then averaged the rest.

The winning group...... the hives with the excluders by a statistically 
insignificant margin.   Hives with excluders averaged 85 lbs.   Hives 
without averaged 83 lbs.

This was a very good year and some of the best and most consistent 
queens I've ever seen in packages, plus they had drawn comb.  I suspect 
the results would have been very different if they had been started on 
foundation instead.

One thing I did notice was that hives with excluders were much slower to 
start using supers and preferred to plug up the brood nest, but once 
they got in the mood to store honey in the supers, they quickly moved up 
the honey and caught up to their non excluder counter parts.  If it had 
been a poor or average year they may not have gotten to that point.


-Tim

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