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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.

Key Facts

    • Protects your bees from predation and robbing
    • Does not interrupt normal behaviour of colony
    • Reduces drifting of bees and therefore potential of disease spread
    • Easy to use and low maintenance
    • No mess
    • No chemicals required
    • Economical and long-lasting.

What is HiveGate


With HiveGate you can position the entrance to the colony directly beneath the winter cluster. This means that every bee in the cluster becomes a guard bee, and any intruders (if they are able to navigate their way into the colony), are quickly and easily identified and repelled.

HiveGate extends the colony entrance to reach the centre of the bee cluster. This means that pests and predators cannot enter the colony undetected; the hive is significantly more defensible. The elongated entrance also means that any robbers that might enter the hive find it much more difficult to find their way out again and die in the hive, and therefore cannot return to report on the location of the colony.

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.

See the video below for further information.

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.

HiveGate – Proven Success

Studies have shown that HiveGate offers significant benefits while requiring limited intervention from the beekeeper.

HiveGate is most effective when used during the most dangerous phase (late in the season when they are defending stores and themselves).

Colonies guarded by HiveGate show significantly higher survival rates than unprotected colonies.

Where to Buy HiveGate

HiveGate is currently available in the UK (please contact E H Thorne) and will be released in other markets soon. Please contact your local distributor for details.

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