Natural Bee Farm

Up until now, my primary method of acquiring bees has been via cut-outs or swarm-capture. I like cut-outs because for all intents and purpose it’s a turn-key colony complete with queen, bees and brood. I have had trap-out opportunities in the past that I passed up because of lack of brood-comb, but I decided that these opportunities needed some more thought and innovation. Sans brood-comb to act as a bait (and provide eggs to make a new queen) what is the best option? A queen. Of course, I am reticent to buy bees, but in this case, there was little choice. I am just not at the queen-breeding stage yet for providing my own queens. That is certainly something I’d like to explore later on, however right now I’m just concerned with growing my apiary and grow up the hives that populate my apiary. So far I’ve collected swarms – which are often very easy to handle. And I’ve performed cut-outs. Now it’s time to do a trap-out. So, just what is a trap-out?

There are several ways bees can be removed from a property. If the colony is a mass of bees hanging from a branch or similar, it is usually called a swarm and can be shaken into a bucket and removed from the property. If the colony has sequestered itself within a cavity tho, removal becomes more complicated. They start making comb right away and can have several large combs in the space of a couple of weeks. There are generally two choices to remove these bees therefore. The first option is opening up the cavity, either by removing panels if in a wall, removing soffits if they’re in an eave, or by whatever means for whatever cavity they have set up shop in, and then physically cutting the combs out and tying to frames and then collecting the bees. This is called a cut-out. It usually takes around four hours, perhaps longer if the cavity is harder to get into. The other option is less destructive to the structure containing the colony, has a few caveats  and takes a lot longer. It involves sealing up all entrances to the cavity but one and covering that with a one-way exit so bees cannot enter back in. A trap-hive is placed very close to the old entrance and baited to entice the bees to enter and make that their home. To convince the bees to stay in the trap-hive, often brood-comb is put in it with eggs so the bees can make a new queen. Or a weak hive can be used too – the influx of bees from the trap-out would significantly strengthen the hive. This is called a trap-out. It can take six weeks tho – and it leaves the comb within the cavity. But it’s non-destructive and if done correctly can facilitate using the same bees to clean the old cavity of its remaining honey so there is little to cause decay once these bees have fixated on the new hive as their home.

When the flow of nectar and pollen stops coming into the old cavity and the numbers of bees declines sharply, the queen stops laying. Nurse bees eventually get old enough to leave the hive and when they do the population drops even further. What is left are the queen’s attendants and the freshly emerging brood. Generally, when things get to that state, the rest of the bees abscond from the cavity altogether and leave to find another home. This can take a while if there are a lot of stores in the hive – but a month to six weeks seems to be an average period for this. Once these bees have left, the trap-out is effectively over. However, before removing the one-way exit, some time needs to pass for the bees to more solidly fixate on the trap-hive as their home, as well as to allow for a good amount of brood to be produced which will further identify that hive as their home. However, we don’t want the remaining honey in the old cavity to go to waste or get too badly infested by wax-moths, so after a bit of time goes by without any activity within the old cavity, the cone can be removed. The bees will now go in and rob out all the honey from the old cavity, leaving little more than chewed up comb. They can rob pretty quickly – a day is often all that’s needed. Once they start ignoring the old cavity the trap-hive can be removed and the old cavity can be sealed.

In this case, the cavity is within a tree. The owner desires to keep the tree but not the bees. So a non-destructive trap-out is prescribed for this removal. Since my other hives are still growing and I don’t want to remove valuable brood-comb from them I opted to use a queen as bait. I’ve not read of anyone else doing this, but I am confident that it will work. The idea is to get the bees fixated on her and let them bring the rest of their sisters in. Once she’s been in there for a couple of days, she will be released and start laying eggs as their new queen and this colony will continue to grow as the old cavity empties out. These bees will very quickly build new comb too. Most of them are returning from foraging with crops full of nectar and it has to go somewhere.

I scheduled the trap-out for last Saturday, April 22 and ordered a queen from Bee Weaver Apiaries. They stopped treating their queens for mites about nine years ago and have developed a pretty decent strain of survivor queens that should blend well with the survivor feral genetics I keep in my apiary. She arrived the Wednesday before the trap-out and I kept her and her attendants in a cool, dark location for a couple of days, putting drops of water on their cage so they don’t dehydrate. There was candy in the cage so the bees had food. I sewed up a square of 1/8″ mesh hardware cloth into a cone and got the wooden-scaffold that would hold the hive up by the cavity’s entrance ready and loaded in my truck along with the trap-hive.

The entrance to the cavity is perhaps nearly 7′ up in the side of a tree. The cavity was apparent by the bulge in that section of the trunk – it was easy to get an approximation to the size of the colony in there. I expect a single trap-hive will be sufficient for this particular trap-out. I will be looking at another trap-out that may let me use two trap-hives to clean out. Driving back there and setting up made me thankful I had a pickup-truck – an essential tool for beekeepers who remove colonies. Up until this year I had a diminutive Ford Focus and had to squeeze the bee-hives in the back seat. Not anymore. I rolled the scaffold out of the truck, taking it from upside-down in the bed to upside-right on the ground, and positioned it by the tree. The bees hardly noticed. Then I backed the truck up next to it so I could access it from the bed of the truck.

After positioning the hive approximately, I got to work mounting the one-way exit to the entrance of the cavity. The screen cone fit over the entrance perfectly, but it was rather hard nailing it in – my next trap-out cone I’ll make sure I have nail-tabs cut to make it easier. The bees did take notice when I was putting a cone over their entrance and hammering nails. I got enough nails in to hold the screen steady then I got to work with the caulk-gun, laying a thick, messy bead around the base of the cone to seal up the gaps. Very quickly, the bees had only one way to exit the cavity – through my cone. Already there was a small cluster of bees hanging from the bottom of the cone while they tried to make their way back in. That was promising. I observed for a little bit to make sure I didn’t leave any gaps.

Once I was sure that the bees had found no gaps, I got to work on the next stage of the trap-out – setting up the trap-hive and installing the bait. Since the queen was a stranger to these bees, I opted to leave her in the cage for a couple of days to make sure the bees accept her. So I took the cage and put it against the wires of one of my frames that had some old comb on it and secured it in place with a rubber-band. But, I didn’t put the frame in the hive right away. Before I left I wanted to be sure that the queen would be well cared for. And I wanted to make sure I had a cluster of bees in the hive. So I put the frame on top of the hive by the screen cone and waited. A few bees landed on the cage and it looked like a few immediately started trying to feed the bees within. That was promising. A few others were biting on the screen, as if trying to release her. None of them seemed agitated as if they were trying to get to an intruder. I probably could have released her directly into the hive by the way these bees were acting, but decided the cautious road was safe. As bees started clustering on the screen, I held the frame with the queen-cage under the cluster – close enough to let the bees crawl on and most did crawl onto the comb and queen-cage. Before long I had several dozen bees on the comb and I rested it against the hive and watched as more bees landed on the comb. I noticed a lot of fanning on the comb too – scenting, which no doubt attracted more bees. They were certainly infatuated with the queen.

When I was satisfied that most of the bees were now going to the comb rather than clustering on the screen, I gently inserted the frame into the trap-hive, re-inserted an empty frame and closed things up. Then I waited and observed. It seemed at first that the trap-hive was going to be ignored, but soon I saw bees crawling into the hive and other bees crawling out. A couple crawled out and started fanning, which helped guide other bees into the entrance. With perhaps four hundred bees inside the trap-hive, I felt that was a good start to baiting the rest of the returning foragers and I strapped the hive to the tree, put a large stone on the lid and called it a day.

Monday after work I decided to go release the queen. When I got to the location there were a lot of bees flying around. No clusters on the screen tho – it looked like most were coming and going from the trap-hive. I was eager to take a look inside. I parked the truck next to the scaffold and clambered up to have a look-see. When I opened the box I was amazed by the amount of bees in there. Easily two or three thousand bees. Some were working on the existing cut-out comb, making repairs and extending it. Others were festooning from the comb-guide of the next frame, getting ready to make a new comb. And still others were busy filling the cells with nectar and pollen. It was quickly becoming  a hive. All that was needed was a laying queen. I pushed the cork in and to the side in the candy. I would have pried it out but it didn’t cooperate. Then I poked a hole thru the candy. And that was that. As I was re-inserting the queen-cage under the rubber-band, there was already a bee in the hole chewing on the candy to release the queen.

I closed up the trap-hive and put a queen excluder over the entrance. That would keep the queen from absconding if for some reason she wanted to. But I have a feeling she’ll be right at home there with her new brethren, ready to start laying and making that colony uniquely hers. I’ll check on the hive the weekend after next to remove the cage and queen-excluder and check for brood and activity in the cone. If they’ve made a few combs, I’ll open up the new broodnest with an empty to begin developing straight foundationless combs. Then I’ll leave the hive be for a couple more weeks.

Most of my work is now done and it’s a matter of letting the bees make themselves at home in their new hive and waiting for the brood in the old cavity to hatch out and leave the old hive to join the bees in the new trap-hive. When I determine that the old cavity is no longer active and there’s new brood hatching out in the trap-hive, I’ll remove the screen-cone to let the bees rob out the honey in the old cavity then I’ll retrieve the hive the next day and I’m done. The cavity will then be able to be filled with grout to prevent re-colonization and I will have started a new hive by borrowing the bees from the old hive and giving them a new queen. The old queen and a cluster of attendants will have flown off to a new home, and the property owner will be happier without the bees causing problems.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at 16:47 and is filed under Bee Removal . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.