First let me say up until perhaps just a bit more than a decade ago I pretty much believed (based upon my work for a couple of commercial bee keeping outfits) that a queen excluder was a honey excluder.  At that time (say 12 years ago) I began reading some old ABJ and ran across an article by Jerry Hayes titled 'Is a Queen Excluder a Honey Excluder' and this started my own questioning of my presumptions concerning queen excluders.  I spend one season replicating his ideas and now pretty much use queen excluders on all the hives I use for honey production.  Although I don't recommend the site to anyone really interested in well reasoned beekeeping the only place I know of an easy to obtain copy is on BeeSource.  The basic idea here is you close off the bottom entry and train the bees to use a top entry and thereby the field bees really do not have to pass thru the queen excluder at all.  This process also tend to decrease congestion and back filling of the brood nest so it also appear to somewhat relieve at least part of the driving forces behind swarming.  I personally use wire bound queen excluder.   

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