Thanks, Dave, for taking the time to go into all that detail in
response to my queen-excluder-to-self-retrieve-swarms suggestion.  I
really enjoy hearing how the big boys do it.

My system is, on the whole, "drone unfriendly".  I keep a pollen trap
under my hive for the first half of the season to keep the bees from
plugging frames with never-to-be-used pollen.  The QE just causes the
dead drones to collect rather than straining them out.  I empty them
out every month or two.  I have no way of knowing, of course, but my
notion is that bees "want" to have drones in the hive as part of
their ability-to-requeen-in-emergencies instinct.  If so, they do not
necessarily check to be sure the drones can get out if such is
necessary to perform their intended function.  In such event, they
might not be too disturbed by the dead drones.  I can tell they try
to get the dead ones out, as one would expect, because part of the
drone bodies are missing.

I'd like to make a strange point here:  Most of the time most of the
bees have nothing to do.  Like soldiers between wars and duty firemen
between fires.  Watching an observation hive, especially in the
middle of the night, makes this plain.  So worrying about bees being
saddled with unnecessary tasks is misplaced IMO.  (I'm not talking
about during a strong flow, obviously.)

I requeen with store-bought queens after the end of my last nectar
flow in mid-July every year.  In spite of this, I always have many
new queens started every year and find them inspection after
inspection.

I often find the swarms I capture have virgin queens which can
squeeze out of the slits in a queen catcher.  I presume they would go
through a QE also.  I always put the swarm queens in a "Thurber Long
Cage" for a couple of days to preclude re-swarming.

My system of using a QE under works just fine for someone who has the
time to use it.  Most of the time the hive only swarms once - if you
don't catch them in the act, you might not even know they had - but
one swarmed five times before they gave up.  Bottom line:  I never
lose any bees.   Dan

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