I have not experienced workers carrying eggs above a queen excluder
since I no longer use them. Instead I use a barrier of 2+inches of capped
honey in the top brood chamber and it works for me.
        However, last week I had occasion to remove a new swarm queen from
a NUC  I had started from her hive. She had layed two frames of brood with
beautiful pattern [I moved her to a children's observatioin hive locally.]
I used a queen catcher to do so as I did not trust my gloved fingers. This
was a smallish queen and seemed to me to have a slim abdomen. Sure enough,
she crawled right out of the spaces with the workers, flew around to the
front of the hive and went back in. She did this twice. The third time I
took her in the catcher with closed hand to a closed car and let her out,
marked her with my ungloved hand, and put her into a transport queen cage,
and she is a joy to watch in the new quarters.
        This is a long way of saying that I would not trust bar type queen
excluders to work with every queen; particularly a swarm queen who may not
have a full load of sperm.

John F. Mesinger
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