Hi Aaron:

We have always used rimless excluders on our bees. We have not had
any trouble with the bees working through them, but there are some things we
do that may prevent the problems others are having.

1) We keep our bees in two full size brood chambers with an excluder on top.

2) We do not try to draw full boxes of foundation through excluders. We
start with a box of drawn frames and put four foundation frames amongst the
drawn frames. If we have to draw a box of foundation, we leave out the
excluder. This produces a box of drawn frames that has had a round of brood
raised in it. These frames are much stronger for extracting. Our uncapper
tends to damage plastic frames that have not had brood in them, probably
because they vibrate more than the
wood frames with plastic foundation.

3) We have one large honey flow from Canola which lasts about a month. We
put out 3 supers of drawn frames over an excluder before the flow starts.
The supers have frames that have been extracted the previous year but still
have the residual honey in them. The bees find them attractive and usually
clean them out and repair them in the first two or three days. There is no
problem getting them to work through the excluder unless the brood chambers
are already jammed up with honey. It pays to get the supers on early, and it
is helpful to harvest a round of honey from the previous lighter honey flows
to prevent the brood chambers from getting jammed up.

4) We use nine or ten frames in the brood chambers and use 6 5/8 supers with
8 frames in them. There does not seem to be any problem with the frames not
being aligned.


                                    Best regards

                                    Donald Aitken

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