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General Q&A, Bee chat and only Bee chat please
 #12824  by Steve 1972
 11 Jun 2022, 17:04
Cable_Fairy wrote:
11 Jun 2022, 08:53
I have a swarm all week about 10 yards from my front door, it is all of three feet long and must be about a foot in diameter, the next door woman is going demented that no one is interested in getting it. It is 50 foot up a tree on the end of a branch that looks like it would not hold a sparrow.
Can you not fire a line up over the branch and shake them down onto a blanket..
 #12826  by JoJo36
 11 Jun 2022, 19:56
What a waste of bees!
Its a shame nobody can tie a rope around branch, and shake into a hive directly positioned underneath so they can't resist their new home??!!
By the time it's set up the bees would have flown off??!! :)
 #12827  by Alfred
 13 Jun 2022, 08:45
It's such a long way up - they will either take to flight before hitting the ground or land in a giant radius.

The opposite situation for me last night,I picked up a cast swarm from a pubs beer garden.
They were on a wall four foot off the ground
I brushed off the cluster but it was too warm for the flying bees to settle and they had no intention in going in the box.
We had not much time,as it was some distance from home and the landlord really wanted his premises back.
They were still attracted to the brickwork they had landed on.
I didn't want to use smoke on it at that point.
I used the trigger spray and put water on it and that did the trick and was able to scoop up a dozen soggy bees ,and dump them at the entrance.
We were treated to a glass of refreshment and sat at the bench in the sun with the garden to ourselves( could have done without full suits on).
Out of boredom I sprayed the flyers with water.
Almost straight away the circling got tighter.
A few minutes more atomising the air had all but a few fanning at the entrance.
We could have been there for hours but for a zero cost bit of kit.
 #12828  by AdamD
 13 Jun 2022, 09:54
I have a new batch of laying queens which is good to see - just eggs at the moment. I am wary about marking the queens too early as they are very flighty when fresh.

I have one colony that had queencells yesterday; I did not have the time to do anything more than cut out the queencells. I hope they'll stay put until Wednesday when I can deal with them properly. I have a 4 week laying queen I want to use. Not sure whether I should do a classic artificial swarm and then put the queen in the queenless part located at one side or whether I should put the new queen on the old site without any brood, put the supers on and let the flyers return to the new queen on the old site - something I've not done before. In either case, I don't want the old queen.
 #12832  by JoJo36
 14 Jun 2022, 06:15
Hi Adam
Would you not risk the flyers killing your new queen?!
Are you not safer to put her in a desperate brood & put a newspaper between her box and the existing g one (with old queen removed) and that way after a few days they would be safely joined and you can whittle the brood down to one box if required?!
Not sure if I've got the gist??!! :)
 #12834  by AdamD
 14 Jun 2022, 08:58
I have heard/read that the technique works in that with no brood, the flyers return to the old site and accept the (caged) queen as it's the only chance they have got for colony survival.
Young bees will more readily accept a new queen, so the alternative of putting her into a queenless colony first and then uniting with newspaper once accepted is probably the more usual way.
 #12835  by NigelP
 14 Jun 2022, 12:06
They do indeed accept a different queen. It is my go to method for requeening 'orrible hives. I stick the hive with the good queen next door to Mrs horrible, then move mrs horrible. to elsewhere. If really horrible queen and all the brood gets destroyed, no point prolonging the bad girls. Then it's either a shake out or newspaper/air freshener unite depending on circumstances.
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