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. *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html