I would like to improve my use of excluders as well.
    The main problem is the reluctance of some colonies to go through them
in the spring, when one is using configurations other than a single brood
chamber. This results in crowded brood chambers, more swarming and less
honey. Of course, everyone has instituted a favourite management technique
of some sort to combat the problem. However, the trick is to discover a
technique or innovation that saves time, reduces hive manipulations,
decreases swarming and improves honey production.
    I am unconvinced that changing the grid size of excluders will make
much difference. Actually, some colonies prefer crowding the brood chamber
when faced merely with drawing foundation, and no excluder. Further, once
you get reluctant bees working above an excluder, they seem to pass through
them with little trouble. Although I am not sure I have seen any “run”
through them; though they will occupy a wet super pretty fast near the end
of a nectar flow regardless of how they felt about them in the spring. (Are
spring bees fatter? More conservative? Less aggressive?)
    I am wondering whether anyone has tried using queen pheromone (a Bee
Boost strip) in the first super above the excluder?
    Additional queen pheromone by itself contributes to less swarming,
according to Mark Winston in The Biology of the Honey Bee. However, I
recently read John Pedersen’s article “Use of Pheromones in Beekeeping,”
(Vol. 21 No. 7 – Spring 2000, Canadian Beekeeping. In this article he
describes how some strips lost in the yard attracted a huge cluster of bees
overnight. If so, why not attract them above the excluder? Wouldn’t this
have somewhat the same effect as moving stores or brood above the excluder,
without the effort?

Tom Swanky
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