Advantages and disadvantages of "lighting systems for beehives"
aside, has anyone ever actually NEEDED to (as the subject says)
"make" the bees use an upper entrance, or any "alternate" entrance?

I've never seen a case where bees are reluctant to take
advantage of any "additional entrance".

a)  If you add a super and fail to align it properly,
    the bees will be using the opening within hours.

b)  I use the old trick of cutting an upper entrance
    in the "thick side" of the inner cover.  Again,
    the bees adapt quickly.

c)  Imrie Shims?  Same thing.

d)  Open or close the pollen trap?  This is the one that
    causes the most obvious confusion/entertainment, as
    the bees come in for a landing, but have to abort
    their final approach and hover while they look for
    the new entrance location, or land on the wood where
    the entrance WAS, and crawl around.  But even then,
    I have yet to see it take longer than a day for
    efficient operations to reappear.

I have seen some hives that "liked" their upper entrance
so much, that the lower entrance was hardly ever used.
Even carrying out dead bees was done via the top entrance.
This made me suspect that something was amiss, so I took
the colony apart to see if a mouse had taken up residence
on the bottom board.  Nope, nothing wrong, they just
"preferred" the upper entrance, for reasons unknown.

On the lighting, I'll give it a fair test:

  I've got a bunch of 4-inch-square solar panels, and a bunch
  of electroluminescent panels (backlighting panels salvaged
  from old and dead laptops).  I can cut the electrolume panels
  to any shape I want, and tape them to the underside of an
  inner cover, and wire one solar panel to each electrolume panel.

  I can then point each solar panel in a different direction
  (sunrise, mid-morning, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset), so that
  the appropriate area of the hive is lit as if sunlight were
  coming into the hive, but without any heat gain.

  If the bees forage any later, I'll notice.  Time of last
  sortie or return from last sortie is an objective metric,
  and has a clear direct advantage to the beekeeper.  The
  other claimed advantages are just too subjective to test.

  I empty pollen traps on these hives every evening, so I'll
  be able to check.  But even if it "works", I can't see this
  as a practical and cost-effective enhancement.  Unless one
  has this sort of junk lying around, it is expensive stuff.

                jim (Who, when installing an 8-pin connector
                 on an inner and outer cover and soldering
                 cables, will be sure to hear SOMEONE in
                 the lab say "WIRE you doing that?")

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