The books / Pests, Predators and Robbing / chapter 6 of 14
The entrance reducer
All chapters
- The dangerous weeks
- What a dearth looks like from the hive
- How robbing starts
- The beekeeper rings the bell
- Recognising it
- The entrance reducer
- The robbing screen
- When it is already bad
- Wasps through the year
- Strong colonies repel, weak ones fall
- The trap that works is the spring one
- Mice in October
- Bears
- Leaving them alone
The entrance reducer is the cheapest and most important defence in this book, a notched strip of wood or metal that narrows the opening a colony has to guard. Reduced down to a single bee's width, one bee able to pass at a time, a handful of guards can check every bee that tries to enter, something they cannot do across a full-width summer entrance built for maximum traffic.
Three colonies are especially vulnerable and should carry a reducer through the whole dearth, not just once robbing has already started:
- A weak colony.
- A new split.
- A nuc.