I received a call to remove bees from a tree. The owner said that the he saw the bees for the first time the day before. He was pretty sure they were not there very long. I decided to vacuum up the guard bees and look in as well as I could and then smoke them out based on them moving in this week. I removed a lot of bees from the entrance but the moment I stopped to look into the hive they filled the entrance with bees again. I was finally able to see inside and I could see dark orange comb in it. I kept trying to get a picture of the comb but as you can see below there were too many bees.
[attachment=0][/attachment]
[attachment=1][/attachment]
Here are 2 videos that I took after I installed the Trapout.
https://youtu.be/a-tXifcPQlk
https://youtu.be/bQ-EZK5VjCw
Hope these help those who want to do Trapouts.
How long it will take to completely trap out this hive?
After the trap out is over what do you do with the entrance into the tree?
Quote from: beepro on June 09, 2018, 07:54:23 PM
How long it will take to completely trap out this hive?
After the trap out is over what do you do with the entrance into the tree?
I just checked on this hive. The bees are definitely moving into the Nuc. The problem is that the bees in the hive are covering the inside of the wire cloth and the field bees are feeding them through the wire.
In the past the bees have moved out in about 3 to 4 weeks. I am going to have to add a screen over the cloth. I suspect this hive to take a lot longer. It is an older bigger hive than the other ones.
I will fill the void with expanding foam to seal the hive up.
Jim
Here is a picture from earlier today.
[attachment=0][/attachment]
Quote from: sawdstmakr on June 09, 2018, 08:05:27 PM
I am going to have to add a screen over the cloth. I suspect this hive to take a lot longer. It is an older bigger hive than the other ones.
I would think a piece of thin plywood(or anything solid) would work better than screen. It would concentrate the scent from the hive to just the cone area. I also think it would help if the entrance of the nuc was a little closer to the base of the cone.
Cao,
I have done that before with a small hole for an exitthe bees died it th tree from lack of air. I won?t do that again.
None of my recent Trapouts boxes have been real close to the hive. The last 2 even caught the queens.
Jim
To prevent the bees feeding each other, is there a way to make a double mesh for the
trap out, one inside the other? This way the bees cannot feed each other with a gap in
between the 2 mesh. / / \ \ <<== Double mesh with gap in between.
When I put the next piece of screen on I will staple one side and then stretch it tight to the other side of the opening. That will provide a gap.
Jim
I think I would just suck them off the screen and let them go miles away from the hive. Could be home apiary if it is far enough away.
Ace,
In five minutes it will be covered in bees again. This is a big hive. If you look very closely, you will see that the entire inside of the wire is a solid mass of bees. I already vacuumed up 2 to 3 thousand bees the first day and it did not change anything.
Jim
OK, 2-3K bees is not a lot of bees if the colony is 60K strong. If the bees on the inside are continually fed they are not going to leave. So I am thinking those bees that are doing that have to be removed. I also think closing that screen off would help. I think that would encourage more bees to get outside the hive.
Ace,
I will be putting another layer of screen with a gap between it and the existing screen so that they cannot make contact. I do not want to block airflow because it is very possible that I could suffocate the bees in the tree before they can get out.
Jim
That is one scenario. The foragers are covering the screen so the ventilation is cut off anyway. Cut it off for them. Make it hot and they will exit. They can still exit right? The goal is to get them to exit.
Ace, your posts are showing how little you know about trapping bees. The more you post, the more you show how little you know, so it would behoove you to quit guessing and just stay quiet.
No, they will not leave. They will cover the brood and fan until they die. If the feeding isn't stopped, they will last long enough in a weakened state for the SHB to take over and kill them. ETC. ETC. ETC.
Quote from: iddee on June 10, 2018, 06:51:04 PM
If the feeding isn't stopped, they will last long enough in a weakened state for the SHB to take over and kill them.
Jim is going to put another screen on to stop the feeding so I guess again they will die and the SHB will take over. Or do you think not?
Wally, what is the end game of a trap out? The SHB, wax moths and any food seeking critter comes in and consumes what was there. Some time passes and a swarm will take up the cavity. History repeats itself.
Ace,
The idea of a trap out is to make it so that as the bees leave they cannot get back in. Normally they cannot get in they move into the provided Nuc that eggs in it. In this case they can feed the bees nectar through the wire so they are doing it. If I add another layer with a gap they will no longer be able to transfer the food and then they should go in the Nuc.
As the bees keep leaving, younger and younger bees become field bees. No food is coming in and egg laying should stop. When the food runs out the queen and the remaining bees abscond. When that happens I will use a can of foam and fill the void so that the bees cannot reuse the tree as a hive.
Jim
https://beemaster.com/forum/index.php/topic,20038.0.html
And you provide a photo of a traditional trap out cone which has a wooden base. The wooden base gets mounted to the elongated entrance very similar to what Jim shows. Then the part of the entrance that is not covered by the wooden base is completely sealed. Your photo Wally is not the only one that I have seen. I would call it the norm.
https://beemaster.com/forum/index.php?topic=20038.0
" Your photo Wally is not the only one that I have seen. I would call it the norm."
You would know or should know Brian seeing is great, but it does not beat
doing. As much as Wally wont welcome the attention I am going with his
remarks as to input from you here on this topic.
Jim, three items of interest which may build pause for thought.
*Ventilation;
On the opposite wall/end/side of the cone placement a 25mm penetration
screened with stainless steel fine mesh.
*Entrance;
When setting up provide a 25mm penetration, screened both sides of
ply/rocksheet. Again stainless steel mesh is a must have,
*Cone;
Wrap/cover the cone up to 100mm from the open end. Use material
that prohibits sunlight penetrating by 100%.
As said before today I do not follow the popular method of T/0, but
these adaptations from my method may be of help to yourself and
others in that method. Lucks to those bees.
Bill.
Ace and Bill, average temp for my trapouts, 40 to 60 F. Average for Jim's, 80 to 100 F. Now take that into consideration and you will see the difference.
Yep Wally, it's a nonstarter for me under 70F and the higher it gets the faster
the job gets done. So I prefer to go in around August September where
the day climbs from a 75F dawn.
Bill
Wally, brood nest is 92 so what is hot to us is heaven to them. My wife was down in FL last week. She actually admitted it was hot. We had miserable 50's and rain. Garden is growing. Grass is ridiculous.
Ace, cut the ventilation off in a hive when the outside temp is 90 and it will melt the wax. 145 F. plus. It takes much less ventilation at 60 than at 90. Remember the heat produced by the bees that has to be dispersed.
Any beekeeper I have ever known says that bees will leave the hive and beard if the external temperature gets in the 90's. I could be wrong but I don't think it is any different in FL. If it is, it will be something new to learn. Ventilation should be for oxygen and a 2 in opening on a hive is more then adequate for that. Now if they cover the cone then yes that is a problem. If that happens I would abandon this attempt and do a Hogan Trap out. Trapping the queen first. Once that is done the trapping box can be a little farther away from the parent entrance. It could grow to 2,3,4 boxes.
""Any beekeeper I have ever known says that bees will leave the hive and beard if the external temperature gets in the 90's. ""
I don't think any beek has ever told you that.
""Any beekeeper I have ever known says that FORAGERS will leave the hive and beard if the external temperature gets in the 90's.
Maybe this, but not the first. They will not abandon brood.
As I said above, Ace, the more you post about trapping, the more you show how little you know. Ventilation is for heat control, not oxygen.
"Any beekeeper I have ever known says..."
Brian even if you were on major speaking circuits the largest number of beekeepers
in the loosest of associations ("I have ever known") would be at least four digits
removed behind the decimal point in terms of those beekeepers actively practicing
at any point in time. n short.. south of 0.0001%.
In contrast?
I have travelled the breast (edit...breadth) of this Land in my Life thusfar, allowing
myself to actively meet hundreds of beekeepers and in what time I have left there
is no way I could possibly get across the 10, 000 or so in Queensland alone, as a
cumlative number in a whole Life.
I'll be very lucky if I can even get to meet 1% of the growing numbers arising from
a new trend in adopting native bee (Tetragonula) colonies in our gardens.!
Again in short... it is not possible nor wise to hinge/anchor an oracle on the numbers
of beekeepers one 'knows'.
Here is the common thought you can read of in modern studies or indeed in those
works of olde Authors.
External to the hive body clumping (bearding) is the outcome of maintaining
unproductive bees. The cause of which there can be more than a single element at
the same time, clumping requires addressing if the behaviour persists as a daily
display.
Bill
(edited to supplement deviate sex driven schpelt shagger)
Quote from: iddee on June 12, 2018, 09:23:34 AM
Ventilation is for heat control, not oxygen.
Can't you just picture Wally shimming up a 3 or 4 ft diamerter maple to drill holes in feral bee hives to cool them off. :tongue:
:cheesy: :cheesy: :cheesy:
Check the temp of any hollow, living maple on a hot summer day. It will be cool to the touch. I have ran my hand in too many of them as a youngster looking for baby squirrels and snakes. The hollow areas never heat up significantly.
PS. I was told today that I insulted you. If I did, I apologize. I was just doing the normal picking and teasing and meant no real harm.
Quote from: Acebird on June 12, 2018, 08:33:30 PM
Quote from: iddee on June 12, 2018, 09:23:34 AM
Ventilation is for heat control, not oxygen.
Can't you just picture Wally shimming up a 3 or 4 ft diamerter maple to drill holes in feral bee hives to cool them off. :tongue:
Why not... I am having a roight ol' giggle watching you do trapouts from a keyboard!!
{LMA0}
Bill
Quote from: iddee on June 12, 2018, 10:15:56 PM
PS. I was told today that I insulted you. If I did, I apologize.
Wally, no need to apologize. We both know we are having fun.:-)
Wally, take a look at this one.
http://www.beesource.com/forums/showthread.php?346895-Tree-Trap&p=1644387#post1644387
About all I see there is, "If you aren't successful, close it up and kill the bees." Is that the point you are making?
Also, it is in northern Kentucky. I hope you aren't comparing the temps. with Florida.
Define success for a trap out. What is the percentage of trap outs that you get the queen?
Percentage of trapouts I remove a queenrite hive from is probably higher than 100%, as I get 2 to 4 queenrite hives from many trapouts. Since my goal in a trapout is to REMOVE all bees and honey, without killing them, plus raising queens from my better strains, my success rate is very high.
What method do you use to get the queen out? The Hogan trap out is the only method that I have heard of that gets the queen. I have heard of numbers of lower then 10% success at getting the queen with a traditional trap out.
Ace,
I have not done a lot of Trapouts but the 2 I completed this year both got the old queen.
Jim
Hold on a minute men I need to pop some more popcorn and refil my glass. 😂
https://beemaster.com/forum/index.php/topic,20038.0.html
Jim, how did that happen? What Wally keeps linking to agrees with what I said. The queen is practically the last hold out. Weeks after the trap is first set.
With a Hogan trap out you bait the queen with unrelated brood. She goes into the box because she thinks there is another queen in her hive. This should happen in hours. The queen is trapped in the new box but the nurse bees can go back and forth through a section of queen excluder. They won't start a queen cell in the tree because they still get the pheromone from their original queen. In less than a week they can't start a queen cell so at that time you can move the trap box and just like a split that stays close to the parent hive all the foragers go to the queen right box. The only purpose for the screen cone is to prevent the emerging brood from staying in the tree and becoming a laying worker hive. As Wally says in the other post when all the bees have left the tree then you pull off the cone to rob it. To be on the safe side I would move the trapped hive a couple of miles away. I wouldn't let that hive do the robbing.
Because honeybees are not motivated to rob during flows it seems to me the hive should be completely sealed and then opened up in the next dearth. No harm would come to the honey if other insects could not get in. An issue might be that they are already in. I am not sure if the lack of oxygen would kill everything.
Read the link you posted, Ace. He did not get the queen with the Hogan method. He gave up and killed the remaining bees. I have seen a lot of posts like that. I think the queen catch % is low on the Hogan method with first timers. Cleo developed the method and likely has much better luck. Jim got those two queens because they were new swarms that had just moved in and had not gotten the brood nest built out well. They had no stores and the queen came out because of a lack of food and support. There are always wax moth and SHB eggs in a hive. The honey would be destroyed if you didn't allow it to be robbed out immediately.
Quote from: iddee on June 13, 2018, 05:43:19 PM
The honey would be destroyed if you didn't allow it to be robbed out immediately.
But will they rob it out immediately? My last remaining hive is a LW hive and I stood it on edge over a week ago. The bees haven't left and it is totally vulnerable. This is my experience with offering honey or cappings when there is a flow on. they totally ignore it. It is pouring now. I will see if that makes any difference.
Brian,
What Iddee said except I did not kill any bees. In both cases all of the bees were out for several days to a week before i sealed them up. I doubt there was any honey left in them, one had just swarmed before I always.called and the other was a swarm that had moved in a week before I was called.
Down here, by the time the queen moves out, the SHBs are hatching if not before.
Jim
Jim, it was the link Ace posted that killed the bees, not you.
Ace, I'm betting if you shook all the bees off the frames and set the hive up against a strong hive they would move the honey quickly.
"Hold on a minute men I need to pop some more popcorn
and refil my glass. 😂"
...heh, pop a bucketfull and grab a jeroboam, the action scene doesn't
begin until the Eltalia Method gets into this script!
Apart from the earlier similarities posted EM departs entirely from those
touted, and salavages all bees within 7-9days, cavity stores removed
within 14. All weather permitting as it is all about timing. ;) ;)
BM
Quote from: iddee on June 13, 2018, 06:42:37 PM
(edit)
Ace, I'm betting if you shook all the bees off the frames and set the
hive up against a strong hive they would move the honey quickly.
Exactly.
Bill
Quote from: sawdstmakr on June 13, 2018, 06:39:09 PM
Down here, by the time the queen moves out, the SHBs are hatching if not before.
Jim
How sad. So the hollow of a tree is cleaned out before the next swarm moves in. I am beginning to think that in FL it is not how well you manage honey bees but how well you manage SHB.
Quote from: iddee on June 13, 2018, 06:42:37 PM
Ace, I'm betting if you shook all the bees off the frames and set the hive up against a strong hive they would move the honey quickly.
Wally, I sold the other strong hives. The next strongest hives might be two miles away.
Quote from: Acebird on June 13, 2018, 08:34:36 PM
Quote from: sawdstmakr on June 13, 2018, 06:39:09 PM
Down here, by the time the queen moves out, the SHBs are hatching if not before.
Jim
How sad. So the hollow of a tree is cleaned out before the next swarm moves in. I am beginning to think that in FL it is not how well you manage honey bees but how well you manage SHB.
Ace,
You have to keep your hives strong, compared to the sized of the hive. Also my bees know how to keep SHBs under control. Not all bees know what to do and the SHB will slime it. I suspect that if you brought in bees from a non beetle area that the beetles would take over the hive.
Jim
Quote from: sawdstmakr on June 13, 2018, 11:16:21 PM
I suspect that if you brought in bees from a non beetle area that the beetles would take over the hive.
Jim
I agree with this. And it makes me wonder how you could completely trap out an established hive in the south. It takes weeks for a normal trap out and each week it gets weaker and weaker. How many days does it take the hive beetle to take over the hive?
When the bees stop keeping the beetles locked up, they start laying thousands of eggs. In about 3 days the larvae start hatching out. It the bees don?t remove them, they start sliming the frames. Sometimes only one or two frames are slimed. The bees move out when all of the brood is slimed.
Jim
So would you estimate that you only have about a week from the time the trap is first placed that the beetles will slime the hive?
Quote from: Acebird on June 14, 2018, 09:57:07 AM
So would you estimate that you only have about a week from the time the trap is first placed that the beetles will slime the hive?
Ace,
The hive will still have plenty of bees after a week, depending on the starting size, to keep the beetles under control. It isn?t until a large number of nurse bee are forced to to bee field bees that the hive becomes too weak to keep them under lock and key.
Jim
Here is another one in Tampa, FL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=K4S3-yPChyM
@Acebird
As you likely know Brian that fella has copped a lot of flak
in another place for his early technique(s), unjustly I thought
so I tried getting to help him out in yet another place. But it
seems the damage from the dogpile was so brusing "the finger"
was the only response I saw.
This video shows he is still at TO 101 near on a year later!
Your SHB mention was noteworthy aa I have never given them
a second thought and might now change the last stage of my
Method in consideration of timing, albeit I complete inside of
14days, weather permitting sometimes 9.
Bill
Quote from: eltalia on June 15, 2018, 11:16:48 AM
@Acebird
As you likely know Brian that fella has copped a lot of flak
As you likely know Bill that forum is noted for a lot of flak. Pretty sad that personal attacks are allowed to continue. I continue to visit it behind the scenes because I learned at a very young age that many good ideas come from people who don't have 29 years experience. I really don't know the guy but in his video he exhibited problem solving skills and a willingness to dig in. That gets a thumbs up from me.
Quote from: Acebird on June 15, 2018, 05:21:56 PM
Quote from: eltalia on June 15, 2018, 11:16:48 AM
@Acebird
As you likely know Brian that fella has copped a lot of flak
As you likely know Bill that forum is noted for a lot of flak. Pretty sad that personal attacks are
allowed to continue.
Not so much in the Commercial subforum which owns a professional approach.
The sale never saw a change in my view so no subscription from this desk.
Quote
I continue to visit it behind the scenes because I learned at a very young age that many
good ideas come from people who don't have 29 years experience. I really don't know
the guy but in his video he exhibited problem solving skills and a willingness to dig in.
That gets a thumbs up from me.
I reckon I know him fairly well, beekeeping wise. And yes, certainly back then I
identified a keenness(passion) for actually saving (rescue) bees.
Bill