Hey everyone,
A little background on this post before the question.
I have two hives. One April package, and one May package. I put a super on the April one about 3 weeks ago, and at some point during that 3 week period I still had a feeder with HBH in it that I decided would be a good idea to ventilate, which triggered a robbing situation.
It was my assumption (and I think safely at that) that the April hive was part of the robbing on the May one and had stored sugar syrup with HBH in the comb drawn out in their super.
That being said my solution was as follows:
1) Remove feeder from May package. Replace feeder with super (they didn't need any more feed and needed more room anyway)
2) Dump feeder in the woods, placed it on top of my outer cover on top of some bricks so that the bees could rob the remainder out and clean it.
3) Remove super from April package, replace with new one with foundation only.
4) Shake out bees in "contaminated super" onto clean super.
5) Close up the hive put the contaminated super on top of the outer cover and allow bees to rob syrup out of open cells.
So far this hasn't done anything. It doesn't seem like the bees want to clean either box.
How do I get them to do this or how do I remove the syrup manually? (I tried to shake it out but the foundation and wax was too soft and I didn't want to risk it falling out.
Sorry for the length of this post...
I guess I'm confused with what you are trying to accomplish. If I understand correctly, you believe the bees have stored syrup with HBH in your honey supers and you pulled it so as to not contaminate your honey crop? But then you want the bees to rob out the contaminated super so it is clean? What do you think they are going to do with the robbed HBH syrup?
But to answer your question, if there is a good nectar flow on, they will be more interested in that than syrup. About all you can do is wait for the flow to end and then the syrup will be more appealing to them.
Robo, you're exactly right.
The thing is that if they rob that syrup out, they're going to have to put it somewhere. I was told that basically by the time they have built comb to store it it'll likely be other places.