From: "deelusbybeekeeper" <deelusbybeekeeper@excelonline.com>
Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2001 18:06:31 -0800
To: <BiologicalBeekeeping@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: Re: 4.9 versus 5.0 - data

Hi to all on Biological Beekeeping

Pav wrote below:

> Forrest's post prompted me to ask something that has been niggling me.
> Queen excluders. As i understand the story, smaller bees
> build smaller comb, including building smaller diameter
> queen-cells? Does this result in smaller queen thorax, needing
> smaller-gap excluders to stop HRH passing thru (which will only
> become apparent once your 4.9 bees have requeened themselves
> in self-built queen-cells - buying/grafting queens would not show
> it)? Apologies if this has already been answered previously.

> -Pav, thinking even if you allow the queen to run, there are times when an
effective excluder is useful.

Reply:

Ed and I currently use the old style zinc queen excluders and/or metal
banded excluders. The ones we have are dated with age from the 1950s forward up into 1970s. We do though have friends that have bought newer excluders to have problems with them when downsizing here locally. So I would assume (bad assuming) that the sizing changed somewhat over the years, especially somewhere in the 1980s/1990s with newer manufacturers.

All I can say is get the rulers out again and measure to be sure the
distance in the gaps. Maybe we should do that and report back here to each
other. But that means another project and maybe data reporting like already
started with cell size.

Comments? Do you think we need to know?

Regards,

Dee A. Lusby