"Trapping" Honey bees.

[BigBoxaJunk]

I've kept bees for most of the last 25 years, but a couple of years ago, during that really bad winter, I lost both my colonies. The following spring I built what's called a bait-hive. The bait-hive is different from a regular hive, since a swarm of bees will very rarely enter a regular hive. The bait-hive is set up specifically to have the right amount of free space inside it to attract the swarm. Anyway, I had mine set up the last two summers with no success.

This year, my wife put in a few drops of lemon grass oil, since I'd told her that the bees like that smell. Well, that did the trick and last Tuesday, a huge swarm of bees settled on the front of the hive, and in a few minutes they were all inside.


Here's the bait-hive. Only the top box is open, the other boxes are just stacked up to give the bait-hive the right height.

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Here's a close-up showing the guards at the entrance, now that they've moved in.

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[1DOWN4UP]

that is cool.I will remember the oil trick.I used to take a hair dryer,and heat up the foundation to bring out that fresh honey smell,and had success.Been out of it for 10 years,but gettin the fever again.

 

[BigBoxaJunk]

Several times, starting in early spring, she'd gone out and put a few drops of the lemon grass oil inside, and each time there were a few bees going inside to check it out for the next few days. But, when the oil wore off, I wouldn't see any more. We were out there last Sunday and she put the lemon grass oil on a small wadded up tissue and pushed it in the entrance hole, and by the next day, there were lots of scout bees going in and out. On Monday, there were more, then later the swarm came.

Tomorrow, I'm going to open it up and move them into a regular medium super with drawn comb to fill the box. I might even set the bait hive back up, 'cause you never know.

 

[hodgej1843]

Thats awesome

 

[1911ly]

That is awesome. When I was a kid and we lived in the country there was an old guy that had 10 12 hives. He passed away and the property sat vacant for years. But the hives were still going there for years. The last time i was up that way I checked on them and some idiots had crush all the hives. Really sad. It was cool to watch him work with them. The honey was awesome! I hope your new hive works out great.

 

[Frosty]

That is awesome. When I was a kid and we lived in the country there was an old guy that had 10 12 hives. He passed away and the property sat vacant for years. But the hives were still going there for years. The last time i was up that way I checked on them and some idiots had crush all the hives. Really sad. It was cool to watch him work with them. The honey was awesome! I hope your new hive works out great.

thats to bad, because anybody with half a brain would realize how important honey bees are to us.

 

[cascadewalker]

I had a swarm that gathered in one of my apple trees for a few days last week. I even got to witness the "dance" that a scout will do to communicate direction. It got me to thinking that someday I might try to setup a hive to keep some bees. On concern would be that I'm on about 2 acres and surrounded by farm land. I'm sure they all spray pesticides, so I'm wondering if there is a buffer zone or safe distance that a hive would need to be from the surrounding fields to minimize the exposure to those chemicals ?

 

[BigBoxaJunk]

I'm not sure about the effects of pesticide spray from farm fields. Where our place is, there are a few properties in between us and the nearest field.

I do know that, when we lived in another place, we were surrounded by farm fields, even to the extent that I gave up gardening after my plants got zapped with herbicide over-spray. But, I had beehives there also, and I don't think they were ever effected noticeably by pesticides. I wonder if the standard corn/soybean/and winter wheat crops that make up most of the farming around me maybe don't involve the kind of pesticides that harm bees.

 

[1DOWN4UP]

I don't think the sprays mess with em unless they are harvesting from sprayed plants.

 

[joseywales7450]

That's really cool about the lemon grass. Thanks for sharing. I hope someday I'll have the time to keep honey bees, seems like it'd be really rewarding.

So how do you know your new bees are honey bees and not another variety?

I just read a great article in the Indiana outdoor magazine about the work scientist are doing with honey bees at Purdue. Worth a read.

 

[1DOWN4UP]

So how do you know your new bees are honey bees and not another variety?

The swarm will be surrounding the queen.They will be very docile.If they start chasing you,they are probably yellow jackets of some sort.Honey bees are gold and brown stripped.

 

[BigBoxaJunk]

When my bait hive was empty for the weeks leading up to the swarm moving in, I did see that a queen Yellow Jacket had started to build her own nest inside it. I'd see her flying in and out of the entrance when I checked on it. I don't think she had any workers yet by the time the bees moved in, and I'm sure they either "evicted" her, or killed her. I didn't see any sign of the Yellow Jacket's paper nest when I moved them into a regular hive box.

Also, you can tell by looking at these bees that they're most likely a swarm from a wild colony and not from a bee-keeper's hive. For one, wild bees tend to be smaller than domestic bees, because the comb foundation that most bee-keepers use induces the bees to build slightly bigger cells than bees would do on their own. That allows the individual bees to grow a little bit bigger, and the thought was that bigger bees gather more honey. You can tell from the color of the bees that they aren't pure-bred Italian bees, which is what you mostly get when you order your bees from an apiary. Pure Italian bees are lighter yellow-orange colored and wild bees like mine are sometimes a mix with a few yellow-orange bees and some almost black bees and different variations in between. If you look at my close-up pic of the bees at the entrance, the one on the ball jar lid is black on her abdomen, in between the lighter rings, while the bees in the entrance hole are more orange.

I prefer the wild bees because they are much more hardy and they can stand a cold Indiana winter better than the domestic strains of bees, but they can be a little more aggressive.

 

[1DOWN4UP]

Are the apiaries still selling Africanized bees? Guess they really produce but have bad attitudes.

 

[BigBoxaJunk]

That I don't know. I haven't bought a package of bees in over 15 years. The bees that I had in my hives up until 2013 were from feral swarms that I caught myself.

I prefer to keep feral bees from local wild stock that has proven to withstand the conditions. I went through quite a few package colonies that I paid good money for, that came from apiaries in Georgia, and that produced a lot of honey, but weren't able to survive Indiana winters consistently.