#swarm trap

[continent-of-wild-endeavor]

:sigh:

Why??

[journiland]

5/1/2020

Another kiwi may have fallen into my cart at Lowe's when I was picking up lumber for the run. Variety is "Prolific." Prolific kiwis sound good to me.

I finally put a bait hive at my BIL's! He actually sees honey bees around there. I saw next to no bees at all here last year, and none yet this year.

[continent-of-wild-endeavor]

I also have a swarm trap over here on the well house. I set it here last week, mildly optimistic, but meant to take it back to the magical swarm location soon. Now there are bees checking it out, so... I gotta leave it here for a bit. It may just be foragers from my hives, investigating, but if there’s a swarm nearby, I guess I might catch one here, too!

[spreadcasts]

Will and Sarah fetch a honey bee swarm from a bait hive and explain the process. 

Caution: only try this yourself if you have the proper tools and equipment.

[kleesbees-blog]

Magic of Honeybees

[kleesbees-blog]

.... follow

[twoblokesbees]

We think that the bees in our main colony are trying to supersede our original queen. The bees will do this for various reasons such as a failing queen or maybe an injured queen. Essentially they seek to replace her by raising queen cells, unlike swarming though the queen doesn’t leave with the flying bees when the cells are capped. Normally she will remain until the new queen has hatched and mated then the worker bees will kill the original queen. It can be the case that both queens lay eggs simultaneously for a while or even overwinter together! This may be a form of insurance for the colony. Anyway we suspect this process is happening with one of our colonies but to be safe and not risk losing a swarm, we’ve fitted a swarm trap to the hive. It is essentially a Nuc box with an adapted floor. The bottom section is butted up to the entrance (ensuring no gaps), the bees can pass through this freely to enter and exit the hive. If you look at the bottom pictures you can see that the entrance has a queen excluder on it. This means that if the colony swarms the queen can’t escape. Instead she will be able to climb up into the nuc box through the bottom of the trap and via one way cone escapes. This means that once in the nuc she can’t get out. The flying bees, realising the queen isn’t with them, will return to the hive and follow her into the nuc. As with the bottom section of the trap the nuc entrance has a queen excluder allowing access to workers but preventing the queen from leaving. That’s the theory anyway!