How to harvest queenless nurse bees without ever spotting the queen:
Move the donor colony to the side, and put a bottom board and empty hive body down in its place. From the donor colony, put a couple of frames of brood into the center of the hive body, and then fill it out with drawn comb and honey. Then place another empty box on top to act as a funnel. Shake all the bees off the remaining combs into the “funnel.” When you’re done shaking, gently brush the bees down off the sides of the funnel box, using very gentle smoke wafted above them to guide them. The point of this is to make sure that you’ve gotten the queen into the bottom box.
Once you’ve got all the bees into the bottom box, then put a queen excluder over it, and stack the rest of the combs back over it. The nurse bees will quickly move up through the excluder to cover the brood. In an hour, it will be easy to harvest queenless nurse bees from the upper boxes, and the older bees will return to the lower box to take care of the queen and brood. After harvesting the nurse bees, you can add the combs to other hives.
BEE HAPPY Jim 134 :)
