In this video, Laurence Edwards visits Carl Lockyer’s apiary and showcases an underfloor entrance design for nucleus (nuc) hives originally created by Emir Jenkins. He clarifies that the design is not his own, emphasizing the importance of crediting sources and freely sharing beekeeping knowledge. The entrance consists of an 8 mm deep slot in a solid board, which prevents mice entry and forces bees to enter through a narrow space before climbing up, making it easier for them to defend against wasps. Edwards explains how the design improves colony defense by limiting the entry point, allowing bees to line up and eliminate intruding wasps more effectively. He praises the simplicity, low cost, and effectiveness of the build, and promises a link in the description for step‑by‑step instructions, encouraging viewers to adopt and share the design.
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I'm filming a number of videos today in Carl Lockyer's apiary, and I came across this and I said, what have you got over there? And he said, that's one of your underfloor entrances from your design that I made. And I had to correct him and say, it's not actually my design. Like, I got the design from somebody else who was very generous with giving the design out to many people. His name was Emir Jenkins, and it is a great design. So I just wanted to do a video showing you this underfloor entrance again, but talking about why people should be generous with the knowledge that they have. It's all about sharing knowledge. It's all about improving your beekeeping and trying to improve other people's beekeeping as well. Why try and hoard something? It's not giving you a competitive advantage. Okay, it might be giving you a slight competitive advantage in terms of not having as many wasps going into your hives, but some people hoard information and some people are very, very free with their information. So I couldn't resist doing a little video on this here. I love it. Underfloor entrance for a nuc with a solid board in this instance here. Really, really simple design. The boxes just sit on top there. This slot here is 8 millimeters deep, which means that you don't generally get mice going in. But the beauty of this design is that the bees will go in here and then they come up the box here. It's an underfloor entrance, so they have to go in and then up. And the reason this is so good and such a popular, well-thought-out design is that it really does help deter wasps. Gives the bees a much better chance of fighting off those wasps because all they have to defend is this small, thin, single bee space entrance. And you see it in the colonies, the bees line up in front of it and any wasp that comes in anywhere along there, the bees just take them out. Whereas if you can imagine, if you just had this single entrance here and it was that big, far more difficult for the bees to defend against those wasps. So really, really nice that I've kind of seen this design And Carl said to me, oh, I use your design. And I said, no, it's definitely not my design. I've just done a video about it, but I see a lot of people using these now. And it's that sharing of information from Emma Jenkins through to me, through to other people. And I just wanted to double down on it because I love this design. Really cool, simple design. If you haven't made one already, I'll stick a link in the description below showing you how to make these. Really simple, really cheap, really effective.
