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Author Topic: Has anybody Tried this?  (Read 2652 times)

Offline Beeboy01

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Has anybody Tried this?
« on: April 13, 2012, 08:29:34 pm »
I was reading on this board about how to catch the queen when doing a trapout by placing a frame of brood in a box next to the main hive to attract the queen and had an idea. Would it be possible to set a nuc up with fresh brood and have it's entrance touching the entrance of a large hive. I would think that the bees from the large hive would move into the nuc to take care of the brood and maybe the queen would sneek into the nuc to check out the new space and lay in there. I'm not sure what the advantage of doing this would be unless the bees in the nuc decide to start a queen with the fresh brood. Could this be used to pull off some extra bees from the main hive and slow down swarming? Any thoughts about this, I'm trying it right now with one hive and have a queen cell on a frame of brood in the nuc. So far the bees are going into both the nuc and the main hive and with a queen cell in the nuc I'm not too concerned about having the queen moving around between hives. I'm just curious if anybody has tried something simular to this and what happened? Thanks
Ed   

Offline enchplant

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Re: Has anybody Tried this?
« Reply #1 on: April 14, 2012, 10:03:03 am »
Well normally in a trap out you have physically connected the trap to the feral hive with a tube or some such. It doesnt just have its entrance close by. So if you have a nuc which was physically connected to your main hive and it had brood in there then sure bees will go in there to take care of the brood.
It is an interesting idea. Let us know what happens
 :)

Offline Beeboy01

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Re: Has anybody Tried this?
« Reply #2 on: April 14, 2012, 03:53:24 pm »
So far it looks like the field bees are entering both the main hive and the nuc with about eight bees going into the main hve to one entering the nuc. I am seeing a lot of bees crawling back and forth between the two entrances so there has to be a splitting of the work force between the two. A corner of the entrance to the nuc is sitting on the landing board of the main hive so there is direct contact between the two, couldn't figure out an easy way to make a tunnel. I'm going to give it another day or two and then open the nuc to see what is going on. I'm curious to see if the queen cell has hatched and how many bees are in the nuc.
  I remember last year I tossed a chunk of burr comb with drone cells in it by the entrance to a hive and had some of the bees move out of the hive covering the comb. They stayed on that piece of comb all summer untill I scraped it up.

Offline beyondthesidewalks

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Re: Has anybody Tried this?
« Reply #3 on: April 14, 2012, 04:11:24 pm »
https://kelleybees.com/education/resources/Swarm-Harvester.pdf

The link above points to something called a Hogan Swarm Trap.  The namesake, Cleo Hogan, claims you can use this device to trap a feral queen.  Follow the instructions and set the tunnel and then the trap.  Once the bees are used to the trap and using it for an entrance, put a frame of brood in the trap.  Cleo claims that within 24 hours the queen will come see who is laying in her hive.  Then you set the funnel and you've got her.  He mainly uses it to build starts using the resources of the feral colony.  I have a feral hive on which a I want to try this approach.  I'll let you know how I fare.
« Last Edit: April 14, 2012, 04:33:50 pm by beyondthesidewalks »

Offline Beeboy01

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Re: Has anybody Tried this?
« Reply #4 on: April 14, 2012, 04:18:21 pm »
That's where I got the idea from, the Hogan Swarm Trap, I am just trying it in a slightly different way using it to start a nuc instead of trapping out a queen. Thanks for the link.
Ed

Offline beyondthesidewalks

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Re: Has anybody Tried this?
« Reply #5 on: April 14, 2012, 04:35:55 pm »
Let us know how you fare.  I've never tried anything like this other than moving the hive I want to boost in place of the hive from which I would steal the workforce.

Offline MTWIBadger

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Re: Has anybody Tried this?
« Reply #6 on: April 16, 2012, 12:51:22 am »
Ed
To imitate the technique that Cleo Hogan champions, you would need a set up that had one entrance into the nuc and a tunnel from the nuc to the main hive.  What you have created is similar to a typical trapout scenerio with only foragers collecting in the nuc.  Cleo's technique uses uncapped brood to attract house bees throught the tunnel as well as the queen. 

He says he can get the queen out of the tree 100% of the time and 50% out of a house.  If you want to get the queen out of a bee tree, you have to check the super several times a day until you find her in the super.  He mainly uses his technique to rob the bee tree of all ages of bees 3 times a year to use as starts but leaves the queen in the tree so he can continue to rob it.

I have found two bee trees with low entrances. I have put a 3 inch metal collar around the entrances and now am waiting for warm weather and dandelion bloom before putting the super up against the metal collar. The I have to decide whether to just remove bees or bees with a queen knowing the hive may not survive.  Our cold rainy spring weather makes raising queens difficult.

Offline Beeboy01

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Re: Has anybody Tried this?
« Reply #7 on: April 18, 2012, 08:34:55 pm »
So far this experiment is a bust. I moved the nuc away from the main hive and as expected the worker bees returned to the main hive leaving some nurse bees behind. I checked the nuc and the queen cell has hatched but I could not spot her, she probably returned to the main hive before I moved the nuc. I just put the nuc back in the orignial posistion next the main hive and the worker bees have moved back into it and I'm trying to decide if I'll install a frame of young brood out of another hive, move the nuc to a friend's yard and hope they will make a queen. If not I'll just combine it with the main hive.   

Offline D Coates

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Re: Has anybody Tried this?
« Reply #8 on: April 19, 2012, 11:09:36 am »
I have been able to capture the queen out of a modified trap out only once.  It was out of a bee log the I picked up and over wintered.  As the hive grew in the early spring I added a open bottom nuc with 5 drawn frames to the top of the hive.  I checked the nuc frames after work every day looking for signs of her laying.  I started seeing eggs and after a couple days I saw her.  I took her and the nuc to my apiary and assumed the population in the log would requeen as an experiment.  I found an injured virgin queen trying to go on her mating flight about 3 weeks later.  She didn't make it as I found her dead later that day (I assume the was mortally injured as she killed off the rivals?) so I cleared out the log a few days later knowing there would be no brood to worry about and gave another nuc a HUGE population increase.

I figured the original queen would be quite hearty and was planning to breed off of her assuming she made it through the last winter.  Sadly she didn't, but I learned quite a bit from the experiment on capturing the original queen from a trap out.
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