I've banked thousands of queens over an excluder above a strong queenright
colony. I discovered early on that there are a few requirements for success.
    First, you need a strong colony.
    Second, you need the cluster of that colony to be in the top of it's hive.
    Third, and this goes along with two, you need a layer of cloth laying on
top of the queen cages to keep the heat in.
    I had a couple of failures early on when I tried to bank queens over an
excluder. I believe it was caused by the cluster contracting away fron the top
of the hive in cold weather. This left the queens to get chilled. So now I pick
a colony that is located in the top of the hive. I remove the inner cover, and
place an old 7-wire excluder on the hive. I like these because they have built
in wooden strips to keep the cages (screen down) up off the excluder wire. I
usually place 25 or 30 cages on an excluder, and cover this with a 16x20 wool
cloth. On top of this goes a 2" rim or an empty super, and then the outer
cover. I loose a very few queens at times, but they keep in better shape than
on my kitchen table. At the end of requeening I sometimes have a few queens
left in the bank. I've seen these queens remain alive until I wrap the colony
for winter in November.

Lucinda Sewell wrote:

>
> Don't care who says it works, I won't be doing it again.