I am in Peter's camp.  All deeps, no excluder.  Our season is fast and furious.  Strong colonies will fill two with brood and we need that field force when the flow is on.  Also, in MT, we get ~ 1/3 to 1/2 of the bees in any given colony dying before spring of old age - we've a LONG winter.  The pile of dead bees on the bottom board is obvious.   Weak colonies can drop below minimum cluster size to survive.  Our best colonies go in strong, with a minimum of two stories and 120# or better total hive weight.  I'd rather feed extra bees in the winter because I'll have more bees ready to go to work when our ten week bee season starts.  If I don't have a good field force in Spring, the colony will miss the dandelion flow, brood too slow, and be substandard in size when the first major nectar flows hit.


I have run bees in almost every region of the US.  In Seattle, my big colonies would eat more honey stores than they make in a rainy year.  There, I constrained the queen's laying with an excluder on top of the bottom brood box - in June.  Same for Maryland.




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