Has anyone had any experience getting a swarm of bees out of a chimney and into a hive? Does anyone have any useful tips for doing this?
Are you considering a trap out or cut out? I've remove them from chimneys, actually two that I can recall and we removed bricks and the hive and one of my contractor buddies put the bricks back.
Anything all brick is a pain!
Is it a brick chimney in your case?
...JP
As JP said - if it's all brick then it's much too hard! unless you want to try a trap-out! there's some guys on the general discussions forum that can give you some good advice in doing that - but it does take a while... personally i don't touch brick chimneys
Light a smokey fire and catch em on the roof
Yeah, it's a brick chimney. It wouldn't be worth pulling bricks out. I was hoping there might be some way to 'scare' them out and lure them into a hive. I've heard they don't like moth balls or bee-go, so was hoping to remove them with something like that.
It's not my chimney but they've been in there for a while and it's fairly bocked so I don't think smoke would go out very well plus I think all the wax would melt and make a huge mess.
I'll try the general discussion forum for info on trap outs but it sounds like it might be quite a challenge.
Thanks for all the advice!
They usually are between the hearth and the outer brick so lighting a fire generally does zip as to forcing them to abscond. Bee go would only piss some off at best and moth balls wouldn't do jack as it works as a fumigant. Unless you were to wrap the entire chimney with a tarp you could not achieve that affect.
A trap out or cut out is the only way to go here.
...JP
Put an escape board under a box with a couple of sticky frames in it on top of the chimney. Seal up the bottom of the chimney and few puffs of smoke will start to drive them up into the box. Give em a few hours and the you collect and seal the bottom of ya box with a board. The bulk of the swarm including the queen may well be in the box.
I knew a guy that was spruiking those phermone sticks for swarm catching who reckons they work most of the time.