This won't help Aaron if he wants to stop using escape boards, but...

I recall reading in one of my many bee books that escape boards
shouldn't be left on for more than 24 hours or so, otherwise the bees
will find their way back through.

That hasn't been my experience.  In my experience the past few years
of using a triangular escape board, 24 hours is too short a time,
48 hours works reasonably well, but a week is really great - hardly
any bees left in there at all after a week.  They tend to start
building comb under the escape board, but that's easy enough to remove.

I'm sorry I haven't noted whether I was using the escape board
during a dearth, or whether all of the honey above the board was
well capped, or anything else that might explain reduced motivation
on the part of the bees to get into the supers.  I assume that the
recommendation I've read is valid somewhere sometime.  Or perhaps the
design of the escape boards has improved since that advice was written.

I hope that the person who mentioned the tool to make it easier to
insert the escape board will follow up with pictures as promised.
I vaguely recall seeing a "hive cracker" (?) in a catalog at some
point, but I think I may be misremembering the name, because I can't
find it now.  My hazy memory supplies: a largish red metal device
which was inserted between hive bodies and used to pry them apart
with a kind of scissoring action.  I'm beginning to think I imagined
the whole thing.  :-(


Anne, backyard beekeeper, Montreal.

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