well its harvest time and iam going to try bee quick so i dont have to brush off all those bees. before i would put a empty super under the honey supers and let the bees gravity down but i dont use queen excluders and when brood is there the bees wont leave.
has any body used fishers bee-quick and is there any sudgestions?
brian :D
Hold your breath. I hear the stuff stinks :D
I haven't used it, but I have smelled it. Bee Quick smells like almonds. Actually not a bad smell at all. It's all essential oils.
Bee Go smells like vomit. Honey Robber smells like cherry vomit. :) Both are Butyric Anhydride.
They will go down even though there is brood.
Try a triangle bee escape. You need to plan a bit because it takes about a day for all the bees to vacate through the escape, but if you don't need to extract all your hives on the same day, the triangle bee escape is the most stress free way for both you and your girls.
(http://www.betterbee.com/images/triboard.jpg)
The way it works is, bees navigate according to a very strict set of rules. When a bee reaches an obstruction (such as a wall), it will always travel to the right and follow that obstruction till it can go no further. It will never go left. In the case of the Triangle Escape Board, it is easy for the bees to leave - there are three convenient exits. However, they are unable to get back in - and so your Super will soon be empty of bees (unless you get that rogue bee who always goes left :lol: ).
When trying to clear one super, the bee escape works really well. Last time I tried to clear two supers (stacked) at the same time, and it was like the escape wasn't even there. Is the escape only good for clearing one super at a time?
-- Kris
Since our normal ambient temperatures are always so high, I'm apprehensive about using any conventional bee escapes. I simply shake the bees from the combs one comb at a time and transfer them into empty supers.
I have good luck with the triangular escapes unless there is some brood in one of the boxes. They will not leave brood. Also the escapes work better if it gets cool in the evenings.
If I could just find a way to eliminate having to lift all those boxes...
I do lift them only once to put them on. I put the escape on a bottom board and stack the boxes onto that and put the lid on. That way I don't have to stack them back on the hive. But I still have to move them a lot.