Trap Out from a concrete block wall

[David LaFerney]

Depending on the size of the queen,  the excluder may not stop her.  Especially since she will not be laying and slimmed down.  Even laying queens can occasionally get thru the excluder and they aren't half as determined as this one will be.

good luck, will be interested in hearing how it goes.  We all know bees are never predictable :-\

Now you tell me.

[David LaFerney]

Update on this trap out started on July 3 2009:

Part way through this trap out (after quite a lot of bees had moved into the bait hive) I realized that some of the bees were getting back in around and behind the conduit, boxes, and wires.  Because those places were hard to get at I used a can of great stuff to seal up every suspicious looking crack or hole that I could get at.  Iddee said I should have used silicone caulk, steel wool, rags or something else because they would probably tunnel through the foam and get back in again.  

After a few days I suspected that he was right and that they were getting back in so this past Monday morning I was poking around with my caulk gun to see if I could find for sure if they were or not.  While I was doing that a small bunch of bees came boiling out of the cone and flying around it:

Video on utube of bees "swarming" around trap out

I had to go on to work, and on the way it dawned on me that those were probably the last of the bees absconding from the hive.  When I went back by a few hours later they were gone - no bees coming out of the cone, and none trying to get back in like they had been pretty much all through the process.

Today - Friday I went back (about 10 AM on a sunny day) and put a simple cage made out of screen cloth (I'm all out of #8 hardware cloth) over the cone.  When I came back by about 45 minutes later there was only 1 bee in the cage. I figure he's either just emerged from remaining brood or some other lonely straggler.




On Monday I'm going to check again and if there isn't a significant number of bees coming out then I'm going to remove the cone and let them rob out the old hive.  Assuming that goes as planned I'm declaring this a successful trap out.

I learned this - before you do anything else caulk up ever little crack or hole that you can see no matter how small or hard to get at.

[Nathen]

So you didn't try your queen trap?

[David LaFerney]

So you didn't try your queen trap?

No I didn't.  I wanted to but because the bees were getting back in I thought that would probably more or less reset the time period before they absconded.  I figured that as long as pollen and other stores were going in that the queen would probably keep laying, and not abscond.  In retrospect I guess I trapped out enough of the work force in the first week (or however long before they got back in) that they absconded about on schedule.

It boils down to this - because of lack of experience, and the mistake of not keeping them out securely to begin with I didn't know when to put it on.  I didn't want to leave it on for weeks and weeks because I would have to check it pretty much every day to keep from killing the drones and maybe the queen too.

Maybe next year.

[David LaFerney]

I went this morning and took off the cone,  in a few minutes they went right to work robbing out the old hive:

Utube video of the robbing in progress.

Before I removed the cone I did an inspection, added a box of empty frames, and put on an entrance reducer in case another colony gets news of what's going on.

[Animator]

This is a really interesting story to me. I have had many people offer me swarms in cinderblock and I always turn them down. I'm no handyman, and short of destroying the wall, there isn't much I can do to get at the bees. This was a great tale and pics. I am looking forward to the next update.
Mike

[David LaFerney]

This is a really interesting story to me. I have had many people offer me swarms in cinderblock and I always turn them down. I'm no handyman, and short of destroying the wall, there isn't much I can do to get at the bees. This was a great tale and pics. I am looking forward to the next update.
Mike

Here's the update.  I don't know if I went into this before in this thread, but the first try at making a queen something went wrong (maybe she didn't return from the mating flight) and I had to give them another frame of eggs - which was successful and seems to have made a good queen. 

Anyway, the trap out - I let them rob out the old hive for a few days until they lost interest in it.  They didn't get very much honey, but I figured that if it was a small hive to begin with and after weeks of no stores coming in there probably just wasn't very much honey left to rob.  It looked to me like the job was done - no bees going in or out of the old hive in the middle of a sunny day when the other hive was working hard.  So, I came back after dark and took the hive home, and told the home owner that he needed to fill the block cavity with insulation, sand, mortar mix or something or sooner or later a swarm would probably move back in. 

Mission accomplished - so it seemed.  A few days later bees are going in and out of the block wall like nothing ever happened.  I'm not even trying to blame it on a swarm moving in - I'm pretty confident that I just didn't quite get the job done.  By this time it was late August - too late to have another go at it. 

The good news is that I get to try again in the spring - unless the weakened colony dies out over the winter which is entirely possible.  We didn't have a nectar flow after the end of June so they are very likely to starve which will accomplish the exact same thing for the homeowner.  If not, maybe I'll do better next spring with a little experience under my belt.

It's been interesting.  And the little hive that I got out of it has built up like gangbusters since the queen started laying.  I'm having to feed, and it's still a small hive - one cram packed 8 frame medium -  but with a little luck and TLC it should be able to get through our (usually) mild winter.