Wouldn't it work to put a board with a bee escape (probably a Porter
type) between the top box and the one beneath and then leave for a while
- maybe a day? Bees in the top box would go down through the escape
but not be able to return - but they wouldn't have left the hive, so
there should be no losses of young bees. I can see that in this
particular case, with a young queen in the top box, this might not have
worked as the bees might not have wanted to leave her - but in the more
usual case where there are just bees in the top box? Once the bees had
moved down, the top box would be removed and the honey taken.
Gilliane
On 17/09/2020 12:19, Oxnatbees wrote:
Helen, I use a simpler system to clear bees from Warre boxes. I have a flat board and another with bee escapes which go below & above the box. See picture attached, where the equipment has been moved back to the other side of the garden to let the bees slurp any remaining honey off it and the remains of the crushed comb.
You don't do this right next to the hives as that could trigger robbing.
Paul
On Thu, 17 Sep 2020, 11:58 Helen Nunn, <helenmaynunn@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:helenmaynunn@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Hi Paul
Reading this was so interesting. Here's me looking forward to next
year and harvesting a boxful from a Warre instead of a TBH!
Can I ask a question: would your clearer box have been useful,
after you got the young queen back to the main hive?
Helen
On Thu, 17 Sep 2020 at 11:39, Oxnatbees <oxnatbees@xxxxxxxxx
<mailto:oxnatbees@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
A couple of days ago I harvested a box of honey from my big
Warre colony.
I had just checked some details of the procedure with Gareth
as it's a year since I did this. One thing he stressed was,
get all bees out. I didn't foresee a problem with this as the
only time I ever did, was the time I did not check carefully
enough for brood first. (Nurse bees won't readily abandon brood.)
So, I looked through windows. Loads of honey in top 2 boxes,
great. Not many bees in top box, great, unlikely to be brood
there.
Lifted top box and checked bottom of centre combs. No brood.
Good. (And indeed there were no brood in it, that is not what
went awry in this story, but I am describing the process to
help other Warre users visualise the steps.)
So I smoked the remaining bees out and into the parent hive.
This was a bit tricky due to the box weight, layout of the
garden and height of the 5 box stack, but Gareth had
emphasised young bees can't fly, and will get lost in grass,
it is essential to get them back in or on the hive. At the
time I thought I got 90% out this way.
I then took the box to a table 2m away with the intention of
smoking the last few out onto a large sheet of cardboard for
ferrying back to the hive, and it was here the fun began.
Because there were still a surprising number of bees in there.
This box had been on the hive 2-3 years and the combs, though
straight, were welded to the sides by rock hard comb and it
was not feasible to cut them out and brush them off, I would
have killed many bees and attracted robbers to spilled honey.
So smoke and a long poky feather were the tools of choice.
Oh hang on. What's this, after 10 minutes of a seemingly
endless supply of bees coming out in drips and drabs? Oh my. A
young queen popped out, and straight back in again.
Let's just review that for a moment. My bees are like dark
buckfasts in colouring and the queens start out as
yellow-orange virgins, before eventually darkening to near
black and becoming invisible in the crowds. So young queens
stand out like someone wearing a day-glo jacket, and are huge
compared to workers. It was definitely a queen.
Look back at hive. Contented - not queenless. Mother of this
queen (or a rival young one) presumably still in there.
Another fact: queens don't cross honey (no point, they don't
lay brood in honey). This is why I originally checked the
second box for honey - it had a band of capped honey at the
top so the queen would be below there. So this young queen was
"breaking the rules", presumably not in lay yet and maybe
hiding from another queen? Maybe the workers had corralled her
up there away from their first choice as insurance in case her
sister didn't mate successfully? Anyway the point is - once
again the bees weren't reading the books.
Be that as it may, it was essential to get this queen back in
the hive. She /might/ be their only queen, or she /might/ be
being prepped to succeed her mother before winter. If the
colony have kept her alive, they have a reason.
Well, it took another 20-30 minutes to get her out because
queens are nervous of light and if trouble begins, their job
is to run for cover while workers fight it off. But eventually
I got her in a queen clip and released her at the hive
entrance. There was a bit of a scrum of guard bees round her
and she disappeared inside.
This still left bees in the box. I have not seen this before.
It was just honey, but some wouldn't leave, perhaps because of
that queen's smell. I could look right through the box, there
were gaps between combs but you could see a few hiding behind
brace comb etc. Eventually I had to cut the comb out, and I
decided to do this outside rather than fill the kitchen with
bees. This attracted clouds of robbers and it was quite tricky
and, I'm ashamed to say, some bees died. So what have I learned?
* Young queens can hide in areas you don't expect.
* It is a heck of a lot easier to harvest a TBH where you
can take one comb out at a time and brush bees back into
the hive.
* I need to improve the way I get bees out of such Warre boxes.
* You can pack an amazing number of bees into an "almost
empty" box of comb.
* I am unaccountably sticky again.
Paul
