Beemaster's International Beekeeping Forum
BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER => HONEYBEE REMOVAL => Topic started by: The Bix on May 27, 2010, 01:38:01 pm
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I set up a trapout last week and after getting observation reports from the homeowner as well as my own observations, the trapout seems to be working, but slowly. The volume of bees in the trapout box continues to grow and I saw a bunch of queen cells and witnessed a virgin queen emerging from her cell (impeccable timing on my part). But, I and the homeowner have noticed that the bees seem reluctant to exit the cone. Many of them are crawling from the cone base close to the tip and then back up to the base. They CAN get out, the opening is wide enough for two drones and I've seen them exiting the cone albeit slowly. The only thing I wonder about is the cone orientation. Due to the nature of this trapout, I had to place the cone in a vertical orientation. I skimmed the trapout setup section again and didn't notice anything about cone orientation, but all the pictures showed horizontal orientation. The other two trapouts I've done, the cone was horizontal.
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You are in uncharted waters with this one. I have never tried it vertically. If it is working at all, I would leave it and take notes. I have seen them move around in the horizontal cones the same way, so I don't think it will make a lot of difference.
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I try to set the cone up so any dead bees won't block the exit.
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After observing this trapout, I would orient the trapout cone horizontally on all future projects. When there are large numbers of bees exiting the existing hive through the cone, they don't seem to have any problem. But when there are just one or two, it takes a while for the bees to stumble out of the bottom of the cone. They seem to search for the way out, get close to the bottom of the cone, then climb back up and do it over and over, and then after 10 minutes or so, they "trip" and stumble out and seem to wonder what happened. If this is any indication of what future trapouts would be like, I would go horizontal.