Natural Bee Farm

Trap-out screen in place and trap-hive... trapping.

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?

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Barrel of bees with the evaporative cooler resting on top of it.

This morning, I was all set to go move a 55-gallon drum of bees. Just that. The home-owner is interested in keeping them and transferring them to a proper hive but at the moment we needed to get them away from her house until she can acquire some basic beekeeping equipment. Easy as peas, right? Besides, the colony was only a few weeks old and the comb would be rather soft – it’d be nice for it to mature a little before handling it. So, what was that saying about best made plans?

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This is what I saw when I removed the soffit.

I got a removal-gig referred to me by the guys at work – a home-owner had bees in her eave and really wanted them out. As it turns out, she also has a bee-tree that she wants to remove (tree and all), but that’s a post for another day. The colony in the eave was occupying a guest house that the home-owner’s mother is now living in and the bees were extra lively, making the homeowner a bit nervous. This was a taller eave – up near the top of the gable on the end of the building, perhaps 12′ high. And it was a fairly new colony. She didn’t see any activity last winter, and noticed them when she returned this Spring. So it’s a first-year colony, perhaps only a month old. Which is good – not as much honey to muck things up, but also can be a pain – the new comb will be very soft and extra care will be needed in handling.

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Happy bees scenting on the entrance of their new home.

I’m running a bit behind on blogging – this cutout occurred on the last weekend of April. My friend Ty of Windy Hill Organics wanted to get into beekeeping so what better way to introduce one to keeping bees than with a cut-out? You get a complete hive, bees, queen, brood-comb – and you get introduced to the structure of the colony and get a chance to experience a LOT of bees flying around you. My first hive was from a cutout I did solo and it’s been an adventure ever since.

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Wood JHH Style Cutout Hive

A while back a co-worker notified me of a lightning damaged tree that had bees in it. The city had tried to remove the tree by pulling it over, and the top split off down the side, exposing the hive. Needless to say, they scooted out of there pronto. I’m sure they were planning on coming back with some poison later, so this became a rescue operation, as are most cutouts.

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