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Last year while harvesting honey I noticed the middle frames contained larvae. So this year I put queen excluders on, now there are no bees in my honey super on a hive that is strong and should have bee all over the honey box. Seems I cant win. I decided to take the excluder off better to have a little honey than none at all. Please let me know your thoughts.

In the past, I haven't used queen excluders to prevent the queen from laying where she wants. I would simply take only frames with capped honey and no brood. I am playing with excluders on 3 hives this season. On 2, if I read Imirie's pink pages correctly, I had most of the brood below and 2 supers above an excluder and an Imirie shim. The first super above the excluder had some brood in it to draw bees through the excluder, and the rest, open, drawn comb. The top super had all open drawn comb. I suspect I am going to find little going on above the excluder, honey below it, and bees that may want to swarm. On the 3rd hive, I turned an excluder sideways and placed an Imirie shim and a super of drawn comb above it. I think more bees are up in this top super than in the others, but I am waiting on a warm day without howling winds to check. I am planning on keeping these set ups on these hives for this season to see what bees will do, but at least for my bees, I think they are following an old saying that queen excluders=honey excluders.

I have had the same issue as chemicalmaker - two mediums with brood followed by a third medium with brood in the middle frames surrounded by capped honey. I do not use an excluder, but had been contemplating it... I'll wait on Jacob's test results this season before making a decision. Now that I have a third hive, perhaps I can use one to experiment on too!

I never use an excluder. The bees store honey above and around the brood. If they don't have enough stored above the brood to fill a super, I don't take it. That means, I wait until the super is full of honey before I rob. Otherwise, I leave what is there for the bees.

I use queen excluders. After having one year when she started laying in my super, that was enough for me. They'll go above the QE once the flow starts coming in stronger. It doesn't really start going good until around mid May for me in Summerfield. I also take a couple frames that were filled with nectar but not capped enough to extract from the previous year and then I put them in the super to "bait" them to come and get it up above the QE!