I did 2 Trapouts this year and in both of them I ended up having the trapped out queen move into the hive. The first one was in a commercial building in the cinder blocks and I used a plastic bee escape as the trap. This job was an hour away from my house. I put a frame of brood and bees in the Nuc. I checked on them a week later and the bees were getting back in the hive and the bees in the box moved out. There were very few bees coming and going from the building. I pretty much gave up on getting any bees from this job and just worked on getting the bees to move out. Around the 30 day point I checked on them and the Nuc box was busy with bees. I brought them home and I had lots of comb built and lots of wet brood. The queen moved into this box instead of heading for the hills as I was expecting.
Yesterday I took down another Trapout. The bees were in a tree about 12? up and I used a traditional cone as the Trapout. On this one the bees from the frame in the nuc remained active and I waited an extra week after the quit coming out of the tree to give the new queen time to get mated.
I opened it today and found not only 5 frames drawn but another 4 frames below the medium frames that were perfectly drawn out to make it real ease to cut and put in a medium frame. Also to my surprise I found almost every frame full of beautifully capped brood. I was not expecting that at all. This queen also moved into the nuc.
Jim
Awesome! You are the bee whisperer!
Congrats. It does happen, but mostly on new swarms. Once established, she usually stays in the nest until they have raised a new queen. If stores are low she may leave sooner and enter the trap/
Iddee,
I know with the tree Trapout it was a new swarm. The owner contacted me within a week. He knew when they moved in because he saw them ad he and the neighbors dog were stung. Most of the time I was handling them they were nice. My wife was stung this morning while we were putting them in the medium and they made me abandon my riding mower a little while ago. Had to wear my bee suit to finish cutting the area in front of the hives. I will bee re queening it soon.
Jim