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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