Comment by Jedd

Yup, almost always a single entrance, wide (~30cm) though lots of people put in reducers as that's way more space than almost any colony needs, and narrow (about 1cm high). There's usually a small strip pad there to land on, though bees can hover, and don't really need that pad - it's typically 2-5cm deep.

A good candidate for an active defence system as the bees usually take at least a second from landing to getting inside, and a camera / laser could be mounted immediately above and restricted to a straight-down view (so quite safe for humans).

The guardian tool looks similar to something I recently bought, but have not attached to my hive yet[1]. It relies more on the physical mesh (being small enough beetles fall or can be pushed through) than the red colour, I think. The floor inside of my hives are also mesh, similarly sized, but made of metal -- beneath that is a shallow tray of cooking oil.

Personally I don't yet have a baseline for how much of this pest I'm going to have to deal with, but am adopting a 'whatever I can do' approach from the beginning, as their numbers, once inside the hive, can grow very rapidly.

Within my hives I have also have small oil-based traps sitting up higher in the boxes, again that bees can't fit through, but beetles can. Because bees will typically chase the beetles - they can't remove or sting them - and the beetles will try to find safety in crevices, which is the basis of most of these trap types.

[1] https://hornsby-beekeeping.com/beetle-off-entrance-hive-beet...