What About Bee Escapes?

To our knowledge, there are three kinds of bee escapes:

Seriously, we have yet to meet a beekeeper who liked making "two trips to the apiary", required even if the bee escape DOES work.  We call our product "Bee-Quick" for a reason.  Bee-Quick lets you remove supers right now, extract, and return empty drawn comb to the hives before the flow ends.  This means less woodenware to manage, more honey from the same amount of drawn comb, and a lower overall cost of operations.

Bee-Quick also lets you lift a full super only once, when you remove it.  No need to lift supers to place a bee-escape.  As we grow older, even Illinois (medium) supers seem "heavy" to us when they are full.  Maybe you can bench-press full deeps with ease. Good for you!  How many? For how long?  How old are you?  Who is your chiropractor?

The "Porter" bee escape was apparently designed by a watchmaker with time on his hands, hoping that buyers of his bee escapes would pay him to "adjust" them every season.  The big drawback to Porter bee escapes is the fact that one bee can get caught in the blasted thing, and all the bees above get trapped.  (And no, we do not think that all those Porter-sized holes in store-bought inner covers are proof of a conspiracy, but we'd like to see at least two holes per inner cover in the interests of saving untold thousands of bees from untimely deaths by dehydration due to a single jammed Porter bee escape!)

There are many "maze" type bee escapes, but all of them take the form of a "bee intelligence test", designed by someone who thinks bees are stupid.  Perhaps our (Buckfast) bees are smarter than most bees, but they can find their way back through every maze-type escape we have tried, and we have tried them all.  (Heck, our bees find their way into our extracting room every summer, despite our best efforts to keep them out!)

There are also many "cone" type bee escapes, with either plastic or window-screen cones.  The idea behind them seems to be that bees will force their way out through the cone, but will not force their way back in.  In our view, the problem is that bees come in all ages and sizes, while the cones have only one size.

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