Guilfordbeekeepers.org

Jae:

I am a little confused.
Please clarify what you mean by top entrance feeder.
Can you provide a link?

thanks,
Kurt

If you are maybe talking about the Imirie shim the AG agent that inspected some of the beekeepers hives I know told them to take that off. I threw mine in the corner and never have looked back.

One of my hives the bees prefer to come and go from the inside cover on the top. So they are active from the top and bottom and I have to bee careful. They taught themselves this route and like it and who am I to say which is better.

In regards to getting results, my class was several years ago....and it was quite a while.

Perhaps I should edit my response now before everyone realizes I did not read your post correctly.
Now to get back on topic.
My observations and obviously others would indicate the bees certainly do use top entrances. The problem lies in figuring out how to manage your honey supers. This is most likely why we use bottom entrances and just stack the supers above the brood chamber.
I would say go for it! You will need some type of revised entrance, such as an Imirie shim. this shim at some point will likely become filled with burr comb. (more of a bother to you then the bees)
My thoughts are that you would need to run the entrance in the middle, not the top to make honey management easier.
Keep us informed!

Kurt

I've read George imiries pink pages top to bottom several times and was intrigued by his top entrances which he says he's been running for decades with success. He puts five supers of drawn comb on all at the same time. Queen excluder, 2 supers, a shim, 2 more supers, another shim, 1 super and a lid. He says when placed in that order with drawn comb he's never had any major issues with burr comb. He also cuts down access to the bottom entrance to encourage nectar carrying bees to go straight up top.

I built some shims and set up a test hive using them today and will try and update how it does this year.

He runs shallows and I run mediums so I altered it as follows. Queen excluder, two supers, shim, one super, shim, one super and the top.

This will also be my first experience using an excluder so we'll see.

I hope you noticed he was using drawn comb. It will not work if you are using foundation in the supers.

Funny you say that, He said it about 10 times so even I was able to figure out that it was a clue. I have no idea how this is going to work so I'm only dedicating 1 hive to it. I read about it over the winter and it sounded good but I've read just as many people that dont like it. Bout 10 minutes after I set it up, I had guard bees at the upper entrances.

I'm trying to post some pictures.

As mentioned earlier, I cut access to the bottom entrances to about two inches. The idea is that they are supposed to use the top entrances and only take what's needed down through the excluder and leave most of the nectar up top.

At this point I have a major traffic jam at the bottom entrance and guard bees up top that won't let anyone in. I've stood there for 30 minutes watching bee after bee try to go in up top only to watch the guards jump on them and run them off. I guess all the bees trying to go in up top could be from other hives but I don't think that's the case.

I'm going to let it go for a while and see how it turns out.

My top entrance experment is about over. The hive I set up in the above picture was originally my strongest hive but is definitely under performing several other hives in the same yard. Its got one medium super full with partially capped honey and other hives near it are well into filling their second supers and one of those started with new foundation.

To top it all off, this hive swarmed today. By no means do I consider it a legitimate experment since I only set up one hive like this but I be seen enough to be done with it. I'm about to take a couple of the supers of drawn foundation off this hive and put them to good use on another hive which would have gotten new foundation.

One of those things I had to try but it just didn't work for me.

I too have read George's pink pages and bought a couple Imirie shims for future use. This is my first year and I don't need them yet as I am working off foundation in my supers. Why do you think your bees swarmed? George says during a honey flow like we're in now, they only swarm because of lack of super space. Were you reversing your hive bodies prior to the flow?

This time of year, prolific queens can fill brood frames quickly and foragers can fill open spaces with nectar before you know it. Adding supers and checkerboarding brood frames may help with really strong hives. If the bees are making swarm cells with royal jelly and larvae, splitting is another option, but on my really strong hives, reversing brood boxes is not an option because they are all being used heavily. If you don't keep an eye on the need for space in hives this time of year, you may either get swarming or a nectar bound hive where the queen has no place to lay and population begins to decline over time.

Rob spells out what happened to me and a the swarm I caught. They were building out box after box of foundation I placed on them. I kept feeding them because the were a comb building machine. I inspected them into the brood last Saturday and found a capped swarm cell and a few just started cells with jelly. The current queen had stopped laying. Lots of cells were back filled with nectar. So with that, I made a split moving the queen to the new location.

Lesson learned: Be sure the queen has room to lay.

This is my third year and i battled swarms last year and ever hive has swarmed at least once this year. I have pulled splits, caught swarms and given a couple away because I don't need more hives. I've went from 4 to 8 hives this year and still have 2 NUCS that I'm waiting on new equipment to hive so ill summer with 10.

I reversed every one of my hives that needed reversed this spring and a couple of them were reversed twice. I pulled 2 early splits off the above mentioned hive to weaken it and added 4 supers of drawn foundation with the shims in early April. After adding the supers I did not continue to dig into the brood chambers so they may have run out of room but not due to needing more super space because they have 4 supers sitting unused. The biggest issue I have with the shims is that the guard bees won't let the foragers use them. I sit and watch bee after bee try the top entrances only to have guard bees jump on them then I watch the forager go in the bottom.