Apartment Removal - 3 Stories up!

[SystemShark]

I really should start posting questions before I am all set to act... but things just happen too quickly it seems. Anyway I am about to head out to this site again - I got a call yesterday saying that they found ANOTHER hive in a nearby building that they want me to look at. So far I've made 2 trips with my bee vac trying to combine them with another hive. I am at about 80% loss as far as I can tell. There were allot of dead bees inside the top box I put them in and no one is eating through the newspaper.

I just read that when doing the newspaper combine you are supposed to put slices through it and smoke them so they try to get down and intigrate with the hive - I havn't been doing that. Also I've been trying to combine them with my 2 month old swarm. Instead of one of my overwintered / recentlly extracted / established hives.

So today I'm gunna switch tactics..no queen excluder, just single layer newspaper, put cuts in the news paper, and combine with one of the veteran hives.

Also my beevac, as effective as it is at getting the bees out of the exposed area... isn't as good when it comes to transfer. I have a 2.5 hp shopvac I got from lowes... removed the filter and placed wire mesh duct-taped around the working parts so the bees to get sucked in. I cut a whole about 3 inches square and taped on some vynl window screen to provide ventilation and cut some of the suction. I'm going to make another 3 inch square on the other side before I get started today. For removing the bees I spray them with sugar/honey syrup through the screening then open the vac and dump them, like I would a swarm, into the box.

Feel free to ream me a new one and tell me what an idiot I am. I havn't seen this "new" hive yet but I'll let you know what it looks like next time I update.

[Kathyp]

when you do the cutout, are you setting up the brood comb in a box?  you should be able to get a lot of bees into the box and get the rest with the vacuum.  if you are getting the brood set up and getting the queen in the box, you should have a very good chance of saving your cutout hives. 

when i go, i take two deeps and 20 frames set up with rubber bands.  also some 5 gallon buckets with lids.  honey goes in the buckets, brood into the frames, junk comb into a rubbermaid tub with lid.  when i'm done, i tape an entrance reducer over the opening and staple the boxes, bottom board, lid, etc. together and i am good to go.  when i get home, the hive is basically set up and i just have to untaped it.  in your case, you would then dump in your vacuumed bees.

i guess i'm not clear on how you are doing this.  if you are just vacuuming up all the bees and not setting them up, i can see how you might be losing hives.

when you combine, you can spray all bees with lemongrass oil and sugar water...and/or smoke them.  this masks the smell and gives them something to do.  put 1 sheet of newspaper between hives, cut a couple of slits, and add box.  they should do fine.  give top hive an entrance by propping the lid a bit.  i like to put a spacer frame between boxes with the newspaper on top of spacer, but if you don't have one, don't worry.  it's a personal preference thing for me and i made a bunch of them for apiguard treatment.

[Scadsobees]

The vacuumed bees...can you tell how lively they are when you put them into the hive?  Vacuums are notoriously hard on bees, at least for a while until you get it set up right.  My first try with mine made the poor little bees (I tested on about 10 or 20 first!!) look like they went through a blender :'( .

Don't feel bad about losing a hive.  You're gaining valuable information, saving some of the bees at least, and if you didn't the apartment complex would have emptied 20 bottles of raid in there anyway.

It sounds to me like they may have swarmed a week or 3 before, and the new queen hadn't had a chance to get set up very well yet.  So you wouldn't find a big fat queen, young brood, or queen cells.

Rick

[SystemShark]

Just got back, I decided to leave the other one I had been working on alone for today. The apartment manager needs to talk to the higher ups to see if we can cut into the wall. Every time I remove a load of bees it seems like the next day there are just as many up there. I screwed up when I initially did the cut-out because I didn't bring empty frames with rubberbands. There was absoultly no brood build up in the comb that I removed..it was 100% honey - which lead me to belive it was queen less and then to the decision to start vacuuming them out as best I could, making multiple trips, then trying to combine the vacuumed bees with another hive at my house.
The bees seem fine when they are in the device from what I can tell.. during the trip I hear them buzzing evenly and I can see them moving around near the screen / vent. There are usually some dead ones on the bottom after I dump them into the box at home though.

I am trying a trap-out with the new hive. Its one building over and on the other side (in the same apt complex) 6 ft off the ground..they were building up in a bathroom vent that had some space inside and wasn't sealed properly on the outside. I was able to remove the vent and then put some screening over the metal tube so that the bees didn't go down the fan and into the apartment. The owner kept the fan going that pushes air out of the vent.

I setup my cone device that I was planing on using on the other one and the maintenance people set me up with a coordless drill, cement drill bit, and some cement nails to secure my board to the wall. Then we used some lockdown straps to secure a hive body on the top of a 6ft ladder. Inside I had 6 frames with wax pirco foundation..not built up yet..blanks. Then we used some silicon caulking to seal up the edges. I waited around 15-20mins to observe. The bees started to beard on the bottom just hanging there they didn't seem to be able to get in and the one hole at the tip of the cone just had bees coming out and none going in.

It looks like a good setup except for not having broodframe/established comb in the hive..and all the frames. I was wondering what kind of lure I could use.. any suggestions of what to put into the hive near a trapout to encourage them to go in? I'll check on it sometime this weekend and do something more official monday.

Thanks for the responses, you guys are great!

[SystemShark]

well the trapout seems to have worked. I took a hive home x2medium boxes filled with the nicest bees ive ever seen. I picked them up ~9pm last night and took the tape/block off the entrace this morning they were busy checking out their new home..Hopefully I got the queen .. i think i did - or why else would the bees even go in there? I left the cone there overnight because I didn't have time to seal up the entrance again but Im gunna go finish it after classes today. The plan is to set up the vent the way it was before but put some silicone caulking around the edges to stop the entrance from forming. I'm a little concerned because the homeowner said it sounded like they were deep in the walls but I didn't see any evidence at all of comb build up... it looked like it was a swarm that recently moved in.

I ended up dropping my camera from 3 stories up so it doesn't work anymore... drn!

[wildbeekeeper]

its extremely rare to get a queen with a trap out.  it also seems odd that the trap out only took 1 week... a typical trap out will take 6 weeks or more since you need to wait for any brood taht is developing to hatch and then get to the stage where they can exit their hive.  you may want to keep an eye on that colony and leave the cone up awhile........   read up on the "how to do a trap out " post and do a sear h on here.....trap outs are not taht simple.