>they don't use excluders, like its some exclusive club not to
I'd say slightly more than half of the beekeepers I know don't use them. Hardly an exclusive club.
> there are plenty of instances that they are desirable.
I use them queen rearing often. They are nice to have around.
> I think anyone starting out brand new with packages should use them when beginning to super for honey surplus.
Why? How does it help?
>Likewise I think people should tell new folks to 'bait' bees above and through the excluder with a frame of brood.
You mean like this:
"If you want to use an excluder, remember you have to get the bees going through it. Using all the same sized boxes, again, will help in this regard as you can put a couple of frames of open brood above the excluder (being careful not to get the queen of course) and get them going through the excluder. When they are working the super you can put them back down in the brood nest. Another option (especially if you don't have the same sized boxes) is to leave out the excluder until they are working the first super and then put it in (again making sure the queen is below it and the drones have a way out the top somewhere)."--mb
http://www.bushfarms.com/beesfaqs.htm#excludersCertainly. But unfortunately the beginner kit has deeps for brood and shallows for supers, so this doesn't work.
>Without an excluder, a newbie could go the entire year before accumulating enough filled frames to establish a honey dome.
Typically what I hear from the newbie is that they get no honey because the bees won't work the supers at all. How does not using an excluder stop the bees from putting honey in the supers? It sounds backwards of my experience.
>They'd spend the second half trying to achieve extractable frames without brood.
I admit I let them have as much drone brood as they want in the brood nest, and that may be a contributing factor, but I don't see brood in the supers. I don't understand why you think it's hard to get "extractable frames without brood" while not using an excluder. I DO understand why you might say it the other way around since they don't want to work the supers.
>A first year hive doesn't need a top entrance to survive.
Of course not. I kept bees for 30 years without them.
"I know there are all kinds of people who either hate top entrances or think they cure cancer, or double your honey crop. I don't think either. But I like them and here's why..."--mb
http://www.bushfarms.com/beeslazy.htm#topentrance"You can keep bees fine without these, but they do eliminate the following problems..."--mb
http://www.bushfarms.com/beestopentrance.htmI only went to them to solve my skunk problems. The rest of the advantages came along for the ride. But if you're using an excluder, it's an even more dramatic advantage:
" These results are quite dramatic in this experiment. It appears from this limited test that queen excluders may well indeed also be honey excluders. From this data the use of queen excluders should be highly coordinated with an appropriate upper entrance."--Jerry Hayes, Queen Excluder or Honey Excluder? American Beekeeping Journal - August, 1985
http://www.beesource.com/pov/hayes/abjaug85.htmI'll finish up with a quote from Richard Taylor:
"Beginning beekeepers should not attempt to use queen excluders to prevent brood in supers. However, they probably should have one excluder on hand to use as an aid in either finding the queen or restricting her access to frames that the beekeeper might want to move elsewhere"--Richard Taylor, The How-To-Do-It Book of Beekeeping