HiveGate™ | Advanced Hive Entrance

HiveGate is an advanced hive entrance to help protect your bees from robbing and enable improved regulation of the internal hive environment.

By creating a hive entrance immediately underneath the main cluster, HiveGate allows the colony to control entry more effectively and safeguards your bees from wasps (yellowjackets), robbing bees, the Asian hornet (Vespa velutina), wax moths and other pests and predators.

HiveGate also enables better control of temperature and relative humidity within the hive, reducing stress and workload and increasing productivity.

The Advantages of HiveGate

• Economical: HiveGate’s durability without on-going costs makes it highly economical
  
• Effective: HiveGate enables natural bee defence mechanisms, is effective against robbing and predation, and improves colony productivity and survival
  
• Simple: HiveGate is easy to install (‘set and forget’) and fits a wide variety of hive types including nucs
  
• Safe: HiveGate offers chemical-free pest and predator protection
  
• Specific: HiveGate is not a trap, so there is no possibility of by-catch of beneficial insects – only predators attacking the colony will be affected.
  

How to use HiveGate to protect bees from wasps and robbers

1. Position HiveGate so that the internal entrance is beneath the centre of the winter cluster and fix the device in place.
2. Close up the hive entrance so that the only opening is the external HiveGate entrance (an optional Adapter Plate is available to do this).
3. When the colony is strong, additional HiveGate device(s) can be added to expand the entry space, or the hive entrance can be opened up, as the colony is strong enough to defend itself without assistance.
4. Periodically clean as you usually would with hive components.

Bee-IQ's instructions for fitting the HiveGate™ to different hive bases can be found here