Since I wrote about triangle escape boards, I’ve had some questions about which side is up. It works like this: the round hole faces up and the screened triangles face down. You put the board above the brood chamber and below the supers you want to empty.
A typical colony, then, may look as follows:
- outer cover
- inner cover
- honey super
- honey super
- escape board
- brood box
- brood box
- slatted rack
- screened bottom
At night, the bees leave the honey supers and go down into the brood box to stay with the cluster. It is easy for them to go through the big hole, but the next morning, they have difficulty finding their way through the maze of triangles to get back to the honey supers.
If after 24-48 hours your honey supers are still full of bees, one of four things is probably amiss:
- You have left an upper entrance open above the escape board–perhaps in your inner cover. In this case, the bees simply exit through the front door and come in through the upper entrance.
- You have the escape board in upside down.
- You have a queen in your honey supers. If the queen is in the honey supers the cluster will form around her.
- Your brood boxes are so populous there is nowhere for the bees to go. In this case, put a box of empty frames above the brood box (but below the escape board) so there is plenty of room for all the bees.
This side faces up. Photo by the author.
This side faces down. Photo by the author.
It’s like a check valve for bees.
[...] other really cool piece of equipment that Mr. Neil ordered for us is the escape board. Every year when we extract honey, we have the not so fun task of convincing all the worker bees [...]