Well, I've been wondering, with all the talk of big bees and little bees and
whether virgins can get through excluders, what the facts are.

No one has presented any numbers, so I decided to measure some excluders that we
have accumulated over the years.  I've put the results at
http://www.internode.net/HoneyBee/Misc/Excluders.htm rather than plug up the
list with the numbers.  We did not have any zinc excluder  or 5 mesh hardware
cloth handy when we were measuring.  Both work nicely  as excluders, so if
anyone has any measurements for these, I'd appreciate the input.

Now that I'm thinking about this, I wonder about the origin of excluders and who
did the original work.  It appears that the various brands and ages (up to 40 or
50 years old) of excluders we have are all built to pretty much the same gap
specs, even if the wire size and orientation does vary.  I might mention here
that the variations in the older excluders shown in the table did not seem to
bother the bees at all.  All the excluders seemed to work very well.  We see
only a handful of queens above excluders in a year - much less than 1%, and some
excluders I come across have wires bent enough that there is almost double the
normal gap in one or two small spots.

As far as whether virgins can get through excluders as some have asserted here,
it is my understanding that although the abdomen is somewhat compressible and
also varies with the condition of a queen, it is the thorax size that determines
whether or not a bee can get through the gap, and that this characteristic does
not vary over the life of a queen.  Is this true?

Anyhow, all this leads to the questions:

* How wide a gap could we have in a successful queen excluder? Would a wider gap
work just fine and make things easier for the bees and beekeeper?

* Is the present excluder specification a result of careful repeated research or
copycats of one successful design?

*  How much do various strains and individual specimens of currently popular
honey bees vary, and if using varying sizes of foundation results in different
bee sizes as suggested, should we be using matching excluders?

allen
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