this is my first time with top bar. i installed a package and stapled the queen cage to one of the sides. now two out of three pounds of bees are building comb over the cage. should i smoke them away so that i can free the queen and stop the crazy comb building?
stapled? Sounds violent. Yikes. What I did was hang the queen cage from a top bar with thin flexable wire. This way it would swing around and 'hopefully' deter the bee's from building comb around it. Well, it seems to have worked as when I went in 3 days later the bee's had not built comb on the cage and they had released her just fine.
the queen cage had a piece of metal on it to hang it between frames, so i stapled that to the side. seemed like a good idea at the time. i dont mind being stung to much but thats alot of bees to stick my hand into, to get the cage out. should smoking them out be fine?
My understanding is you do not want to directly smoke the queen. I would gently use a bee brush to get them off the comb/cage and then pull it out of there. If it is new comb it should come away fairly easilly. Probably not a bad idea to cut away all the crazy comb so it doesnt affect future bars.
got the queen cage out today. everything went fine. the bees werent clustered over it anymore. or at least not so bad. i think they just got organized and settled in.
For future reference, a lot of people take that metal/wire on the queen cage and twist it around a 2" nail. You don't pound the nail into anything. You lower the queen cage between two bars (then close the bars), turn the nail perpendicular to the bars and set it there. The queen cage hangs from the nail, between the bars, and can very easily be removed and inspected without trauma, when you need to verify that the queen is out.