Cleaning Hive Entrances

Snow closes off a hive entrance so bees can’t make their cleansing flights. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

Cleaning Hive Entrances

It’s a beautiful sunny day after snow, you'‘re bundled up and warm and then it hits you. You have to get outside to clean off your hive entrances!

Honey bees spend winter inside hives clustered as they vibrate wing muscles to stay warm. When temperatures move to 40F or more, they will start moving away from the cluster and taking cleansing flights, taking their elimination outside.

That is, if they can get outside.

One of the best tools to clean hive entrances of snow and ice is among your gardening tools, your weed cutter. The long-handled tool usually has a forked end that makes cutting up ice easy.

One of the best gardening tools to clean hives, my weed cutter. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

As you remove the snow, also check behind the entrance reducer that dead bees haven’t piled up behind the small entrance.

During winter, bees will die. On sunny days, undertaker bees will drag the bodies out of the hives if they can get through the entrance. Since we usually keep entrances at the smallest opening during winter, it’s easy to get those entrances clogged with little dead bodies.

Be gentle as you slowly remove dead bodies. Some bees may be alive but have their wing muscles frozen. You also don’t want to damage or remove the propolis curtain bees may build behind the entrance reducer. Propolis is a natural antibiotic bees produce from tree sap helping to keep the colony healthy.

Don’t remove the propolis seal the bees have built, just remove the snow. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

Once dead bee bodies and snow are removed, place the entrance reducer back. Bees will now be able to easily come and go when the temperature entices them outside.

Cleaned entrance so bees can easily keep house! (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

If you add a feeding shim to the top of the hive, then cleaning the bottom entrance is less of an issue. Having the feeding shim holes at the top allows bees easy outside access in the event the bottom entrance is blocked with snow and ice.

A top feeding shim on one of my Missouri hives. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

Here’s a sneak peek of what is happening inside the top feeding shim. When bees run out of honey, they are getting fed sugar cakes at the top of the hive frames.

Large wire allows the bees to easily move in and out of the feeding shim.

You can also see the propolis they added to the feeding shim on the back side, looks like caramel drips on a cake. Leave as much of the propolis as you can, that’s how bees keep the colony protected from diseases.

A feeding shim with supplemental winter sugar cakes. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)

I used to place feeding shims on my hives in late fall. Now I leave them on all year so bees can get accustomed to the top entrance and moving through the wire to get to supplemental food.

The top feeding shim also lets me stay inside after the snow fall that seals off the bottom entrance reducers. At least in theory.

I’m still usually out after a snow making sure my little girls are ok, lids still on. And after all of these years I still get excited when a see a bee out flying!

Charlotte