bee line.

[bluegrass]

Has anybody tried lining bees? My father-in-law said he used to do it when he was a kid, but just for the honey. I would like to try it, but here in kentucky we have problems gaining access to private property.

[wayne]

What I was taught was to take a bait like a piece of honey, and place it in a saucer in an area where several bees were feeding.
  Once several bees were feeding they were dusted with powdered sugar to make them easier to see. The direction of flight from the location was noted.  You then moved in that direction a few hundred feet, then moved off to one side about 50 to 100 feet and repeated the bait and dusting.
 In time you triangulated the nest.
 

wayne

[Brian D. Bray]

It's a system that works if you have all day and sometimes several days to dedicate to the experience.

[bluegrass]

My father-in-law has a bee lining box. It is a small box with a sliding lid and a small windo in the side. He said that he would put a little honey in the box and then go find a bee on a flower somewhere. He would slide the bee and flower in the box and close the lid. You wait till the bee starts feeding on the honey and then open the lid and mark the bee with with a little felt marker. and then wait for it to leave. After that bee left and returned again he would start moving in the direction of flight. The state of Vermont has a lay on the books that if you line a bee to find a wild hive you can attach your name and address to the hive and it belongs to you.

[thegolfpsycho]

I used to bee-line them often when I was a kid.  I made a box with multiple compartments and sectioned lids out of a cigar box.  I would leave it out for several hours so I would get some heavy traffic going before I set out.  Get a handful of bees in the box and release them every 100 yards or so.  Eventually you have to set up the box to catch more bees and stay on the trail.  I tracked down bumblebee nests the same way.

[Mici]

what baith did you use when lining bumblebees

Don't yo get tricked when you obtain bumblebess from more than 1 nest?

[jfischer]

Just 2 weeks ago at EAS 2006 in Georgia, I taught a workshop (lecture
and field session) on bee-lining.  I'll likely be asked to do the same thing
at various state-level meetings, so watch the meeting announcements
in ABJ and Bee Culture.

Brushy Mountain Bee Farm sells the bee-lining boxes that my Dad
makes for them (he needs the beer money!), and you can order
a state-of-the-art bee-lining box with instructions on how to use it
to line bees.

Baiting bees has never worked for me, but I am sure it worked
back in the days when the woods were thick with bee trees, and
the pastures were thick with bees.

Thats the problem with ALL the old methods - they worked simply
because you could find a bee tree by throwing a rock in any
random direction... nowadays, it takes skill, persistence, and
techniques that really work.

So, we capture bees, we feed them until they are "full", and then
we release one, and note the compass vector it flies along after it
circles to get its bearings.  We then repeat the process with another
bee, releasing it from some distance away, and then triangulate
the two bearings to locate the hive (or the point at which both
bees made a course change due to topography or landmarks,
in which case we have to start all over again, releasing more bees...)

Hey, if it was easy, anyone could do it!  :)

[Michael Bush]

I've had my best luck walking creeks looking for water foragers.  I like to mark them and time their round trip.  A peice of down glued onto them helps if you want to follow them back to the hive or just get a better line as it slows them down.

I've also never had a lot of luck baiting them unless there is a dearth.