Following Gene's discussion on queen excluders and nectar gatherers.
It's my understanding that the colony will typically form the broodnest
near the entrance, and store honey above or to the side or rear of the
cavity.
This puts the food demand area (the nurse bees) near to the food delivery
area (where the foragers drop off their loads).
Pollen foragers unload themselves, into cells near open brood.
Nectar foragers need to find a mid-aged receiver bee, which then first
makes sure that there is nectar available in the broodnest for the nurse
bees, and only then looks for comb in which to store any excess.
In Jerry's experiment (which I have yet to read), the returning pollen
foragers were apparently forced to go down through the excluder.
The question then is whether the mid-aged receivers moved nearer to the
upper entrance, or did the returning nectar foragers had to also go down
through the excluder to unload.

It would be of great interest to run the experiment in an observation hive
with marked bees!
-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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