Plastic 8 way bee escape

01 · HOW IT WORKS

Eight ways down and none back up

The bees come in through the opening in the crown board and find eight channels that narrow towards the exit. Going down is easy; once in the brood box, finding the way back through a narrow mouth is not, and that is the whole mechanism. The difference from a single-passage escape — the classic Porter — is throughput: with eight exits working at once, a well-filled super clears in considerably less time, which is what matters when you clear in the evening to harvest the next morning.

02 · THE TWO CONDITIONS

Without them it is not that it fails: it cannot work

A customer discovered the first one and marked it down as a fault, when in fact it is how this works: if there is brood in the super, the bees will not leave it. They would not leave it with the best escape in the world — which is why an escape is used together with a queen excluder through the season, so that only honey is up there. The second is bee-tightness: the super has to be closed above and at the sides, because any gap they can come back through turns the set-up into an invitation to robbing. Before fitting the escape, also check that the queen is below.

03 · HOW IT IS FITTED

It does not replace the crown board: it screws onto one

It is a part that is fixed with nails or screws around a compatible opening in the crown board, with the channel face towards the brood box. Worth understanding before buying: the escape does not close the hive — it needs a board covering the rest of the passage, because if any other route stays open the bees will use it and the escape will do nothing. Fitted once, it stays permanently on that crown board and is stored with it.

04 · BEFORE YOU BUY

It measures 26 cm across and 1 cm thick, so it barely lifts the hive; it weighs 100 g. The practical routine is to fit it the evening before and lift the supers the next morning: clearing time varies with colony strength and with cold, and in low temperatures they come down more slowly. Check the result before loading — a couple of stragglers is normal, a half-cleared super means there is brood above or a gap left open.