> would like to hear from others who successfully use queen excluders (as do I) for tips for how best to use them.

I don't use them, but I have seen many examples of their successful use. In Northern California in the 1980s, I worked for a beekeeper who had thousands of hives, all with single story brood nests. These were standard ten frame hives with nine frames in them, the queen never had more than nine frames. Last summer I saw the same configuration at the bee lab a Guelph. In fact, they reduce the hives to one single box for winter. I couldn't see any drawbacks to running bees this way. Most of the problems start when you place them over a two story unit. A really good colony will pass freely through the excluder but a subpar one may get honey bound below the excluder (put the honey in the brood nest instead of the supers).

PLB

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