> I have read in a recent post that bees do not like travelling
> through a
> queen excluder unless there is a honey flow on. The queen
> excluder thus
> appears to be an impediment to the smooth running of the hive.

This is simply untrue.

There are specific cases where there can be problems associated with
using any tool.  Both fire and the wheel can be dangerous in the wrong
hands.  Excluders are an invention that never killed anyone, but like
fire and the wheel, they are a technology that not everyone can learn to
use.

Observant and capable beekeepers have various uses for excluders, and
many use them to separate brood from honey.  Personally I would not run
a hive -- except a comb hive -- without one.  I have written much on the
topic before and it is available in the BEE-L logs, so I won't repeat
it.

In short, the bees have to learn to travel through them and there are
times that they learn best.  Bees will sometimes avoid going through
excluders if the queen is poorm or the brood chamber is too large and
they can store enough honey under it to satisfy themselves.  Moreover,
we recently learned here that not all bees will fit through all
excluders.

> I read somewhere that the queen will rarely if ever travel
> from one box to
> another around the edges of the hive, preferring to stay in
> the centre.
> Workers and drones on the other hand will travel from box to
> box at the
> edges as well as in the centre. This fact has, if my memory serves me
> correctly, been used to construct a queen excluder which is
> only big enough to cover the centre of the hive,

This has been covered here in depth, been tried by list members, and it
does not work reliably.  Some small excluders cover only the centre and
some only the outside area.  Neither method gets better than 90%
success.

allen