Plastic beehive entrance Paradise®

01 · MANAGEMENT

The entrance is set to the colony, and changes several times a year

A wide entrance on a weak colony is a front the guard bees cannot cover, and that is where robbing starts; a narrow one in full flow is a traffic jam of foragers at the door. So the opening is not a one-off setting: you open it in spring with the colony at full strength, reduce it on a freshly made nucleus or a split, and close it down in autumn, when the flow drops and the visitors turn up. The two shutters run along the track and are set by hand, from the front and without opening the hive, which is the difference from cutting a strip of wood or stuffing the gap with grass.

02 · WHAT IT DOES NOT DO

Against the Asian hornet it is the height of the gap that counts, not how narrow you leave it

It is the question that reaches this page most often, and the honest answer is no: this entrance does not filter by size. A worker crosses a gap about 5 mm high without breaking her stride, while a Vespa velutina or a Vespa crabro does not get below 7 and simply will not fit — which is why anti-hornet entrances work with a calibrated height of 5.5 mm. Narrowing the opening only shortens the front the guard bees have to defend, which helps but does not keep the hornet out. If what you want is to shut the hornet out, the part you need is a calibrated-gap entrance, with its own trade-off: those same 5.5 mm also keep the drones out.

03 · COMPATIBILITY

It seats in the Paradise floor; it does not screw onto any hive

This is not a universal entrance: it seats in the front of the Paradise floors of their Langstroth and Dadant polystyrene hives, and that is where it is held. A wooden floor, or one from another maker, has no such seat, so the part has nothing to grip — check before ordering if your hive is not a Paradise. It is also the natural replacement when the original one has broken, gone missing or warped, which is reason enough to keep a spare in the apiary.

04 · BEFORE YOU BUY

At the end of winter it is worth running the hive tool along the front: the debris that builds up on the floor of the entrance is what most gets in the way of the bees carrying the rubbish out.