# Alternative Bee Escape Method



## odfrank (May 13, 2002)

I have for two Saturdays now removed a stack of eight supers in the morning, stacking them on a super pallet dolly, with a triangular bee escape upside down on top of the stack. I duct tape any robber leaks in the supers. Most of the bees are out by dark. I then roll the stack into my honey extracting room that has bee escape windows. Makes pulling honey a one lift project. No fume boards, no blower nose, no robbing. The supers don't have too many bees due to mites thinning the hive populations.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

I have, on occasion done this plus another bee escape on the bottom on a bottom board. Most of them clear out pretty quickly and I only have to move the supers once instead of stacking them off the have, putting on the escape and stacking them back on. It's a lot less work.


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## Guest (Oct 10, 2004)

As the day cools off, the bees are more likely to
leave the supers and go in search of a warmer area
of the hive. That said, the cooler time of the year
is not the best time of year to try to extract honey
in anything but a very well-heated honey house, and
is a difficult time to get the bees to "clean up"
extracted frames quickly.

While the approach described clearly did work for odfrank's
hives, there is a downside risk - one may see a lower colony
population due to "lost" bees who cannot find their way home.

While there is no question that experienced foragers can find
their way home from just about anywhere, bees younger than 3 
weeks, (nearly 100% of the bees found in supers) have not yet 
taken orientation flights. Bees take repeated orientation 
flights before becoming foragers at about three weeks of age. 
These flights are a prerequisite for successful homing. 
Bees take multiple flights before attempting to forage.

So there is no way for "house bees" to "learn the neighborhood" 
well enough to get back to their hive.

Questions have also been raised about the ability of these 
inexperienced bees to find their hive from even short distances away. 

There simply have not been any good answers offered in reply. 
The more people who consider the issues, the more uncertainty 
results. Both sets of questions arose in regard to the 
"abandonment" method of emptying supers, where the supers are 
simply lifted off and turned on end, most often atop the hive. 
(This is very tricky to do without starting massive robbing
incidents. In short, one needs a nectar flow going on 
at time of harvest.) The potential for "lost bees" would be
greater the further one moves the supers away from the hive.

Also, a potential problem with the scheme would result if there 
were any brood in the supers, as bees simply will not abandon 
brood without some serious prodding.

Another problem that might crop up in this scheme is with the 
"triangle" type or "maze" bee escapes. Bees can learn how to
get back into supers through both these types of escape, and
if there is a dearth in progress, there may be quite a crowd
of bees from various hives looking for a way to rob these
undefended supers. Cone-type escapes are much much harder for
bees to defeat. Nearly impossible. A bee on the outer surface
of the cone simply can't bend around and poke her head into the
hole in the end of the cone.


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## odfrank (May 13, 2002)

I did another stack of nine supers off of two hives yesterday. After an hour the bees were again following each other out of the bee escape very nicely. I leave the stack within a few feet of my 30 hives. I then wheel it into my bee escaped honey room also 20 feet from the hives. I have never seen any "lost" bees in the 25 years I have been extracting in this room with hives right outside. The only robbing I see is on chunks and spills of honey fallen off from the super removal. One or two bees sit on top of the screen tying to get in. I have seen none actually figure out how to get in. If the robbing season was bad, things might be different. After 30 years of blowing bees, and the extra lifting required to dod so, this is working excellently for my application of keeping bees right outside of my extracting room. I still blow at my remote site.
I will go down to my honey room today and count bees that were still in the pile and now on the escape windows.


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