No Queen Excluder This Year!!!

After talking with a couple pioneer bee keepers, I have decided using a queen excluder is really not necessary.  In fact, it is probably quite counter-productive! You see, the excluder is a barrier to the bees as they rush to store their resources.  If you have used a queen excluder in the past you might remember the bees trying to seal all the holes with wax honeycomb.  They treat it as a ceiling!  Here's what I will be doing this season.  I will add my supers around the end of June with no queen excluder.  The queen will possibly lay eggs in the middle of the lowest super box which only entices the workers to store honey around the edges to insulate the babies.  Approximately 21 days before I wish to harvest honey, I will cage the queen.  The brood that was in the supers will hatch out and the bees will then fill those empty cells with honey.  Wa - la!  The frames will be ready to de-cap, and place in the extractor!