What’s an Imrie Shim?

Our February speaker, Larry Krengel, focused on the topic of swarming. He mentioned one technique in swarm reduction by using an Imrie Shim  What is an Imrie Shim?

The Imrie Shim is a neat little space that goes between the brood nest and the honey supers. It has a small hole for bees to come and go through. The idea here is that the foragers no longer have to land on the landing board and crawl through a few boxes of brood & supers full of nurse bees and other traffic just to finally deposit their nectar into the appropriate cell. With an Imrie Shim in place, the forager bypasses that craziness and is able to be more efficient in collecting & storing nectar.

This shim was conceived by George Imrie, and thus the name. His experiments indicated a substantial increase in the honey produced on hives with the shim vs. those without it.

The shim works best beneath drawn frames only. One can use a shim beneath each super. Once a super is capped (90%+), remove the shim under that super. One removes all of the shims just before the honey flow ends.

Many have reported that bees can cure honey faster due to the increase airflow provided by the shims. The urge to swarm is reduced substantially, as the congestion in the hive is reduced substantially.

If you drill holes in your honey supers, this is an alternate approach to use without drilling your boxed woodware.

Thanks to richmondhoney-bee.com (Richmond, VA) for imrie shim explanation.

Submitted by: Tracy Malterer