Time To Protect Your Bees: When To Add Mouse Guards

In today's video, I'm going to talk to you about why you need to protect your colonies from vermin and when is the best time to put on your mouse guards. Now, I had a really expensive colony that was just coincidentally next door to this one last year that had a huge amount of mouse damage. They'd ripped some of the frames apart and pretty much decimated the colony. Luckily, the colony pulled through, but it really set that colony back. When I went in in the spring, it should have been on 10, 11 frames, Langstroth frames, and it was down to about 3 or 4 frames. So mice can do Huge amount of damage. Now I had a comment on a video the other day saying, what, bees can't sting mice? And no, they definitely can sting mice, but what happens in the winter, as most people will know, bees cluster up into a tight winter cluster and you've got like a warm-blooded mammal that just like strolls into the hive and is like, you're not going to sting me, bees, because I'm just going to eat all of your honey and all of your wax and cause huge amounts of destruction while you just chill up there and don't move. So you do need to offer the colony some form of protection. It's got Got a bee landing on my ear there. From mice and from vermin in general. Now you can do that in a number of different ways. On my full-size colonies, I have what's called underfloor entrances, which is a long thin strip entrance that has a maximum size of 8mm, with the idea that the vast majority of vermin cannot get their head through that gap. That's the idea, and it probably works 95% of the time. You might get some very, very small types of vermin, some types of mice that can get through. But I have to say, I've never had any vermin damage on any colony that's on an underfloor entrance. The benefit of that is that you never need to worry about when to put mouse guards on and when not to put mouse guards on. So if you've got full-size colonies, be it Langstroth or National, highly recommend taking a look at my videos, how to make an underfloor entrance, and then you can just forget about mouse damage completely. But if you are not on one of those systems and you are on a nucleus colony like this, or you're on like a If you've got a full wide open entrance on your hive, then you do need to think about adding something on, and you need to make sure that you do it at the right time of the year. I've seen people doing this before, and they'll kind of go into their colonies middle of November, end of November, and they're like, right, I'm going to put the mouse guards on. And they'll just stroll up to their hives and just put a mouse guard on. And if you're not sure, like, what a mouse guard is, it's just like a piece of metal with some holes dotted in it that allow the bees to come in and out, But obviously the holes are so small that the mice can't get in. But I've seen people do it. They go and put the mouse guard on middle of November, they come back in the spring and the colony's been decimated by mice and they think, well, what's happened there? I put my mouse guard on. And what they did is they put it on too late. And what they did is they put it on without checking that there wasn't a mouse already inside. Gallboy error, that one. I've done it before. Don't make that mistake. So you want to get your mouse guards on really, really early, but you don't want to get them on too early. For example, the bees today are foraging on the ivy, 15 degrees here, believe it or not, in North Wales, 3rd or 4th of October today, and the bees are having a riot. If you put the mouse guard on now, all that's going to happen is you're going to knock off all of this wonderful pollen, late season protein that the bees are bringing in, and you are going to effectively restrict the colony's growth both now and in the spring because you're limiting the amount of protein in the form of ivy pollen that's going into the hive. That is not what you want. So it's a really easy formula for me. End of the ivy flow. And that doesn't mean whether the ivy flow is actually finished or whether the weather means that the bees can't go out and forage it. That's the time to get your mouse guards on. So in the UK, if you want a rough date, probably mid to end of October. All I would do when you're putting your mouse guards on though, is I would just lift up the box off the floor, take a quick peek, make sure there's nothing underneath, put it back down, 'cause that's where the mouse is gonna be. It's not gonna be up in the frames. It would definitely get stung at that point in the year. And then you're just gonna pin your mouse guards in place. Now, if you've got a nuc like one of the nucs here that's just got a small entrance, I wouldn't worry putting mouse guards on. Bee on the nose there, bee just chilling under the eye there. If you're wondering where you get really nice, calm, Buckfast bees from, blackmountainhoney.co.uk. Nucs, queens, everything. These are super, super calm bees. They are genuinely just using me to have a little bit of a rest at the moment. All over the place, I love it. If you've got pretty much any type of nuc in the UK though, so whether it's a Paynes nuc or a Maysmoor nuc or a BS Honeybees nuc or an Oldcastle Farm Hives nuc, Or an Abelo Nuc. Coincidentally, the Abelo Nuc does have a mouse guard feature. But you don't really need to worry about it. As long as you've just got like a small entrance like that and you've got it in a position where the mice can't easily get in, I wouldn't worry too much about it. What I like to do is I like to spin the queen excluder function over at that point in the year. And I find that that offers good enough protection to stop all but the most ambitious mouse from getting in there. I would do that at the same time as well. So I'd wait for the Ivy Flow to finish and then I would get that queen excluder function closed over, and then I would open it back up again in the spring. Same risk applies though. Do it too early and the bees are gonna knock off a huge amount of pollen, which restricts the growth of the colony. Also, do it too early, when the bees are kicking out the drones, the drones will get stuck in that queen excluder, can block the entrance, and it can kill your colony very, very quickly. So if you're doing it on a nuc with that queen excluder setting, later is better. Much less risk in a nuc just because of the way that the entrance is considerably smaller. And again, just take a look inside. If you've got like a different floor and a different brood box, have a little look before you do it. If you're doing it on a full-size national colony, your winter job is to make up some underfloor entrances because then you never have to worry about this again. But the same rule applies. Go in end of the ivy flow, make sure there's no mouse inside, put the mouse guard on the front. All you do with those is you just pin it on. And you can run them in tandem with an entrance reducer as well. So that would be my recommendation. Entrance reducers should be in kind of from any time from back end of August through to the middle of September to try and reduce the amount of robbing that could occur at this point in the year. And then you just put the mouse guard directly over the top. 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