Something I don't understand. Why would you want the genetics of the queen in the tree if you think a small nuc with a swarm already in it will hold all her bees? If I thought she was even near a decent queen, I would think she would have enough bees to fill a full box.
PS. I have never set a trap with a nuc.
iddee,
I'm approaching 4 months as a Beek and you're at 37 years experience....I'm pretty confident I'm not going to be explaining anything to you concerning bees! :laugh:
Anyway, I don't have a good explanation, but I'll give you the only one I have...
As I said, I wasn't even sure I wanted to mess with the bee tree, but given there next option was extermination, I figured anything I did was better than nothing...Even if that meant only saving some of them.
It was at the end of a long days work, followed by grass cutting and a few other household chores. I grabbed what I had available and ran out there to try and get it setup before it got to late.
While I suspect the queen has good genetics, being able to capture her was not my primary goal. If I understood your trapout video correctly, genetics isn't a good reason to do a trapout because you only get the queen 1% to 3% of the time.
I figured at a bare minimum i'd pack the Nuc with bees and achieve two goals. First, give the small swarm I had captured earlier that day some numbers which would give them a better chance of making it. And second, save at least, how ever many bees it happened to take to finish filling that Nuc.
Assuming they fill the Nuc, I always thought I could just remove that box and add another box to the trapout...something else I thought I understood from your video....taking multiple boxes of bees off a single trapout. Is this not an option?
Lastly, concerning your P.S...that you've never done a trapout with a Nuc. I thought the trapout you did in the Bud3 video was setup with a Nuc....but maybe I'm mistaken.
Regardless, what should be obvious to you and everyone else is I'm doing this on the fly, and as best I can. Partly for the fun of it, partly to gain some experience, and partly to try and save a few bees! I'm pretty sure I'll accomplish one or two of those, quite possibly all three. Honestly, I don't have any real expectations beyond that for this trapout.