My garden is probably a fairly mouse friendly place (except for the cat) as I have two rather modest woodpiles in the rear corners which I added to give my frog populations somewhere to sleep and encourage other urban wildlife. The only thing that'd make my garden more friendly (except for removing the cat) would be to add a warm box of food for them to spend the winter in ..which is exactly what a beehive is. The well fed and slightly insulated hive has warmth and plenty food in the form of honey, bees and possibly wax, it's also fairly safe from predators (like the cat), and people are fairly unlikely to disturb the hive till Spring leaving the mouse to spend a happy winter on a high sugar diet.
How do mice get in? They just walk. If it's a cold night and the bees are all huddled up for warmth a mouse can just wander in unchallenged. You would expect a mouse in a hive to meet a fairly unpleasant death by multiple bee stings once the bees become a bit more active and start wondering who invited the furry thing that keeps peeing in the corner into their home, however, whilst I've never actually strapped a video camera to a mouse and encouraged it to enter a hive so I can see what happens, I'm told that once the mouse is in the hive the bees will ignore it completely.
So we want to keep the mice out of the hive. How do we do that? We add a metal mouseguard. A determined mouse can gnaw through a wooden entrance reducer so for this job we need something metal. As with everything else in beekeeping there's umpteen different kinds of mouseguards. What they have in common is that they should provide a metal barrier that the mice can't chew through and present some kind of access that allows the bees to go in and out but not the mice. Mice can squeeze though some fairly tight spaces dictated only by the size of their skulls. I decided to make my own mouseguards from wood and aluminium, they double as entrance reducers too so I put them in place when the wasps numbers rose in the hope that they'll make the hive entrances easier for the bees to defend.
The guards are just a wooden batton the size of the hive entrance with a piece cut out to allow bees to enter and exit. Over that I've put a piece of aluminium in which I've drilled holes through, I think I used an 8mm drill bit, should be enough to let even the drones leave the hive whilst not letting the mice in.
As you can see the bees are getting through the guards ok, there was a little confusion as they got used to the idea and it does slow them down a bit on a busy day -and given the bizzare bursts of warm weather we've been getting there have been some pretty busy days of late.
Just visible in the above image is the edge of the mesh that makes up the hive floor. Whilst it sounds a bit nuts to have an open mesh floor at the bottom of a hive over winter common consensus seems to be that the extra ventilation this provides is more useful than the extra insulation afforded by a solid wooden floor. Apparently what kills bees in the winter isn't cold but dampness and starvation. Whilst we feed them against starvation the ventilation of the open mesh floor should hopefully stave of the threat of damp.
How do mice get in? They just walk. If it's a cold night and the bees are all huddled up for warmth a mouse can just wander in unchallenged. You would expect a mouse in a hive to meet a fairly unpleasant death by multiple bee stings once the bees become a bit more active and start wondering who invited the furry thing that keeps peeing in the corner into their home, however, whilst I've never actually strapped a video camera to a mouse and encouraged it to enter a hive so I can see what happens, I'm told that once the mouse is in the hive the bees will ignore it completely.
So we want to keep the mice out of the hive. How do we do that? We add a metal mouseguard. A determined mouse can gnaw through a wooden entrance reducer so for this job we need something metal. As with everything else in beekeeping there's umpteen different kinds of mouseguards. What they have in common is that they should provide a metal barrier that the mice can't chew through and present some kind of access that allows the bees to go in and out but not the mice. Mice can squeeze though some fairly tight spaces dictated only by the size of their skulls. I decided to make my own mouseguards from wood and aluminium, they double as entrance reducers too so I put them in place when the wasps numbers rose in the hope that they'll make the hive entrances easier for the bees to defend.
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| Mouse Guards |
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| Bees using the MouseGuard |
Just visible in the above image is the edge of the mesh that makes up the hive floor. Whilst it sounds a bit nuts to have an open mesh floor at the bottom of a hive over winter common consensus seems to be that the extra ventilation this provides is more useful than the extra insulation afforded by a solid wooden floor. Apparently what kills bees in the winter isn't cold but dampness and starvation. Whilst we feed them against starvation the ventilation of the open mesh floor should hopefully stave of the threat of damp.
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