Mouseguard time

Cold, dark and windy days.

Now the temperature's dropping and nights are unpleasantly cold mice will be looking for someplace warm to shelter and despite the presence of a few thousand stinging insects a beehive is a perfect place for them. It's warm and full of food after all. If a mouse gets into a hive it can cause a lot of damage eating comb, depleting stores, crapping in the hive, eating bees, whatever, it's never good news. I gather the bees at Pearson Park Wildlife Garden were lost to bees which is a shame because it's actually very easy to avoid by attaching a mouseguard to the hive keeping the critters out. A mouseguard is basically a metal cover for the hive entrance with hole that are too small for a mouse to get it's head through. Typically this is a strip of metal with holes drilled in. Other options are entrance reducers with nails at intervals forming bars too close for a mouse to get through or metal mesh with holes too small for anything furry.

One of my early home made mouseguards, still in use.

In my first season I made my own mouseguards from wooden batons, an aluminium strip and some nails. I still use them on the floors they fit. Unfortunately when I started beekeeping I didn't realise that whilst there's a standard specification for hive components, hive floors seem to vary a lot depending where you get them so my home made mouseguards only fit specific hive floors. Luckily commercially produced mouse guards are actually very cheap and I got a few from an eBay seller a while back.They're usually a metal strip with a couple of rows of 8mm holes for the bees and some smaller holes for nails or drawing pins. Ideally you then pin it to the hive for winter. It's not hi-tech but it works.

Typical mouseguard pinned across a hive entrance

This year it occurred to me that putting drawing pins into the hive body and hive floor every winter is going to reduce the working life of the wood so I decided to try a different approach using nails permanently attached to the floor that I could then wire the mouseguard onto.

Mouseguard wired to a couple of Gimp Pins at either end of the entrance

Simple stuff but it works. Well on some hives anyway. On hives with a landing board like the one in the second photo above I couldn't do this and the mouseguard had to be pinned to the brood box. I've attached little landing boards to most of my hive floors so wound up having to pin guard to the broodboxes. My idea with the gimp pins and wire I only actually managed to do with two of my eight hives and I think three  used my old home made guards. Next year I might try to give it a little thought in advance. Putting nails into the floor of an occupied hive isn't really much fun and at one point a contingent of workers came buzzing out to see me off on the hive above, but over Summer I'll think about doing it on unused floors and with any new floors before they go under the hives.

Mouseproof!

I've read that mice can actually chew their way through the wood if they really want to get into a hive but a metal guard on the entrance should stop them just wandering in. You also need to make sure you fit them before the mice are in the boxes otherwise you're just trapping them in your hives..