In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey explains why he moved away from buying complete poly hives and commercial cedar or Swienty floors, outlines the problems those floors present (mouse intrusion, wasp entry, extra landing boards, and cost), and introduces the under‑floor entrance design. He describes how the under‑floor entrance forces bees to make a 90‑degree turn through a narrow slot, effectively blocking mice and confusing wasps while still allowing bee traffic. Edwards prefers mesh floors with bottom ventilation and demonstrates how he builds his own under‑floor entrance floors in bulk using galvanised mesh, timber, Gorilla Glue, and screws, achieving a functional floor for about £3 each. He offers to share the design plans via his website and encourages viewers to follow his social media for updates.
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Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey, and today I'm going to show you my underfloor entrance. Now, I used to spend loads of money buying floors, and you can pick them up, the wooden ones, in the sales for relatively cheap, maybe £12 to £15, and they're okay. I buy a lot of poly hives complete, so you get the floor, the brood box, A couple of supers, sometimes a queen excluder, a roof, and some of them are quite good, some of them aren't so good. But they are quite expensive, so if you're buying an individual poly floor, they're about £25 or £30. And I just, I didn't want to go down the route of buying complete hives anymore because I was— I had enough supers. I just wanted to get the brood boxes and the floors and the roofs, so I started buying items separately. And I had a number of issues with the floors. So with the normal cedar floors that you get, they're fine and they can let lots of bees kind of flow in and flow out, but then you have issues over winter. You need to put mouse guards on in order to stop mice getting into the hive and destroying the frames, and then if you don't put them on early enough, then the mice can already be in the hive and then it can knock pollen off the bees. So I really didn't like them and it was one more thing to do. The Swienty floors, I really do like them. There seems to be a lot of haters for Swienty products at the moment, but I find their floors are very, very good. They're simple, and the key thing is that they don't extend out past the exterior footprint of the hive, so there's no additional landing board, which for a commercial beekeeper is great because you can get more on the trailer. The big thing that I really liked about theirs though is that they only have an 8mm gap So in order for the bees to fly in and fly out, there's only 8 millimeters, which means that even during the peak flows, the bees can't get in. So there's no requirement to put mouse guards on during the winter, which is good. But they're £25 to £30 if you want to buy them on their own, and if you're buying them in bulk, you'll probably get them a little bit cheaper, but still, they're an expensive item to buy. So I looked at a way of building my own floors, and I'm definitely not taking advantage of the design of this. This is somebody else's design. That I've shamefully copied. So it is an underfloor entrance. So the underfloor entrance is very different to the normal entrance. So normally you have the bees flying in there, and then the mesh, if you have an open mesh floor, would be on this side. So you would have access in and straight up to all of the frames, and that works and that's fine, but it can cause issues with wasps. Very much so. Very easy for wasps to get in, very easy for mice to get in. So some clever person invented an underfloor entrance like this, and the idea between this is that the bees go in here and then they have to navigate this slot here. So you're going in, it's a 90-degree bend up through this slot, and it works really, really well. So mice can't get through that gap, so you never get any mice. The fact that the wasps go in here, They just get confused and you might get the odd one that finds its way through, but generally it's really good deterrent against wasps. I use mesh for all of my hives. I find that I prefer to have the ventilation at the bottom. I know a lot of people are moving away from mesh floors now and going back to solid floors, so I will have a look at that potentially in the future, but at the moment this is what I'm doing. So I build these myself, so I buy the mesh online. You can see it's a galvanised mesh. It corrodes a little bit, but it's fine. It doesn't ever come into contact with any of the frames. I keep it flush. So a lot of people will put a strip along around the edges there, and then they'll work it as a top bee space floor. All of my hives are on bottom bee space, so I can keep the floors flush, which means it's a lot easier to make. And then all I do is I go and buy some timber, I chop it to size, and I'll put a couple of pictures up to show this. I do this kind of en masse, so I do kind of 100 at a time. And then I glue it. The glue you can see here, give it a close-up. Just use Gorilla Glue and I screw it. And as you can see, it's rough and ready. Like, do you mean you've got cracks in there, glue spilling out? Don't care. It's, uh, it's a functional floor. I do it to make it quick and it cost me about £3. Um, and that's it really. So underfloor entrances, if you want to have a go at making them, I can probably get a copy of the designs and put them up on the website, www.blackmountainhoney.co.uk. Or if you've got any questions about them, give me a shout. But I find them very useful, and thanks very much to the person who designed these and put me onto them. Much appreciated. So as always, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and give us a follow on Instagram to keep up to date with the latest news. Thanks very much, see you soon. Bye.
