The internet provides a great (sarcasm) forum and platform for people to share information and knowledge, right? Well, i mean, that's kinda how it started. But then what happened is people just started regurgitating anything they were told or read as if it were fact without actually knowing so they sounded more knowledgeable. Case in point, Google "how to make sourdough starter" and its like everybody found the first recipe ever posted on the Internet about how to create sourdough starter and just copied and pasted it into web pages, forums, newsgroups, IRC, and basically anywhere anyone would listen. Does the recipe work? Depends on who you ask. Read the posts with all the people having issues and read what they suggest. The solutions are also just regurgitated too. The real problem is the volume of ingredients used in the recipe vs time allotted to make the recipe. There are easier ways that work every time and i even have a video on it. Back to beekeeping, the exact same thing happens over and over with beekeeping too. People just regurgitate what someone else tells them without knowing. Maybe their solution works, maybe it don't, they have no idea why either way. Me, i always think outside the box. I look at things, wonder why its this way, and just uber analyze it (that's just me in general btw). A few years ago i started paying a lot more attention to feral bee colonies found in trees, house walls, roofs, other structures and started to notice something consistent across all of them: the openings were 3/8 to 1 inch in size. They didn't chose 3-1/2 inch openings or 4 inch openings or 14-3/4 inch opening. There were no huge entrances in any feral hives i looked at and i really went down a rabbit hole looking at images, videos, posts in newsgroups trying to prove my line of thought wrong. After watching hundreds of youtube videos on feral colonies and bee extractions from every type of structure or tree imaginable, I felt i researched it enough to wonder why its that way. Its that way because it makes the hive way easier to defend and instead of having a lot of bees defending a hive, it takes way less freeing up the guard bees to do other things. So then i spent a couple years testing it, unscientifically but i believe my results can be duplicated anywhere. What i found was, smaller entrance to guard and bees seemed less aggressive and all hives with a smaller entrance consistently produced more honey than hives where the entrances were wide open, but the most important finding is that bee yard robbing went to zilch ... nothing, naughta, never. I also suspect it reduced drifting and also reduced varroa mite counts also ... but really someone with more experience doing research needs to do something more scientific regarding those thoughts. As beekeepers, we need to stop regurgitating things just because someone else said so. I'd actually love to rephrase that and say, as humans, we need to stop regurgitating things just because someone else said so. We are making ourselves more ummmm stupid (hey, I'm old school and stupid is in the dictionary so I am free to use it) Please don't take my word for it though, try it yourself and see what the results are for you. And please please please please please, don't tell this to other beekeepers just because Ed Wiget at Sharp Ridge Homestead / Sharp Ridge Honey told you to.....validate it yourself! ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQdQiIgqw5A