Defyant Cup and Deflector Set of 4

I've bought the full stand, and it's excellent. But since I have a metal-cutting chop saw now, I usually purchase just the cup & deflector sets and assemble DIY stands. Common strut channel fittings (Unistrut or Super-strut) have holes for 1/2"-13 bolts, so to get 5/8" rod to work one has to drill out the holes. So the DIY efforts are not trivial. Here in Southern California we have non-native Argentine ants, which invade human dwellings in massive raids, looking for food. Anything left out can bring them inside in droves. They are highly attracted to sweet substances, and when they invade bee hives, they can cause they can cause even well-established colonies to abscond. (A fellow beekeeper had one of his white boxes completely black it was so covered with ants.) They are particularly pernicious when one is attempting to boost a split or weak colony by feeding syrup. I've had these ants also kill a purchased queen in the cage before she could get out -- very disappointing. Even a moderate ant incursion can cause your bees to become irritable and defensive. It is almost impossible to keep bees successfully in coastal SoCal without some kind of ant protection. For about 1.5 years the DefyAnt product was not available, and I tried my best to fashion barriers out of oil-filled tuna fish tins with 4" aluminum baking rounds as deflectors. These cost about the same as the DefyAnt product, but didn't work nearly as well. We sure are glad to have DefyAnt back in the game! I don't have a main apiary but instead keep bees all over my county on people's ranches, where they have orchards and want the pollination. Sometimes a couple weeks or more may pass before I can back to a colony. It's good to be able to rely on the DefyAnt design without always worrying. Of course, it's not completely maintenance-free . . . not much is out there in the wild. You can screw the deflector down such that bees won't crawl in and foul the oil, but other bugs can get trapped in there, like earwigs (yuck!), and oil can get displaced by rains. It can also become old and gelatinous -- then the awful ants can form a bridge, sacrificing their bodies to do so, such is their determination to access the honey. But even in this instance, the number of ants that can traverse the compromised barrier is limited, and the raid can be stopped. The instructions for use also caution against barrier being defeated (bridged) by wind-blown debris -- leaves and twigs. To reduce chance of this, positioning the foot on 1/2 a brick helps, such that the cup is elevated above its surroundings. It will take a lot of leaves to accumulate to cover the thickness of a brick or two. Nothing is magic, but this product works better than anything else that I've tried. If you have ant problems, use DefyAnt to make better use of your valuable beekeeping time.

Great product. They were exactly what I expected. Very easily adapted to our project.