  In this work we study the predominantly orbital and radial excitations of
hadrons containing a single heavy quark. We present meson and baryon mass
splittings and ratios of meson decay constants (e.g., $f_{B_s}/f_B$ and
$f_{B_s'}/f_{B_s}$) resulting from quenched and dynamical two-flavor
configurations. Light quarks are simulated using the chirally improved (CI)
lattice Dirac operator at valence masses as light as $M_\pi \approx 350$ MeV.
The heavy quark is approximated by a static propagator, appropriate for the $b$
quark on our lattices ($1/a \sim 1-2$ GeV). We also include some preliminary
calculations of the $O(1/m_Q^{})$ kinetic corrections to the states, showing,
in the process, a viable way of applying the variational method to three-point
functions involving excited states. We compare our results with recent
experimental findings.
