Thank you Zuzana for letting us meet your bees! And also thank you for
welcoming my daughter she had a really nice time!
Paul thank you for putting more thought into this.
Do you think you would have a link or some pictures to share and show me how to
do a shook swarm or explain as best as you can. I have heard a couple of
different methods one was shaking the top bar of the previous hive into the new
hive by tapping the top bar with comb and brood but it was the same size hive
so they could insert the comb with broods and bees before giving it a kick. I
guess it will be more difficult for me a the warre is a lot smaller. Someone
else mentioned using a cone and shaking the bees inside the cone so that once
they enter through it they can’t come back out. There is also the worry of
making sure we have the queen inside....
Separately to this in terms of logistic when would the best doing:
- late afternoon I would go pick up the hive witch is less than a mile from, we
would seal it once the last bee has got inside the and then move it to our new
site which is about 5 min drive
- assuming there is still an hour left before dawn would try to transfer them
immediately or keep them sealed overnight and do it the next day morning or
evening ?
As there is also the worry that they are less than 3 miles from their original
location. So my idea was to once transferred keep them in for 2-3 days with
good ventilation and then use twigs and branches in front of their entrance to
make them reorientate? Any thoughts?
Thank you again
Magalie
On 6 Apr 2019, at 16:22, Paul Honigmann (Redacted sender "paul.honigmann" for
DMARC) <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Thank you to everyone who came and particularly Zuzana for her tolerance and
hostessing despite a very busy schedule!
If anyone has any good pictures for the blog write-up please share
(especially if you have one of me, I don't have so many of those). Meanwhile
here is one of the group in the bus shed.
Magalie - I have been thinking carefully about your question, how to transfer
bees from a National deep brood box to a Warre. I am saying this on this
public forum so others can add their insights. [Magalie is being given a deep
brood box from a National, full of bees, but has a Warre hive. I advised
against a grow-down, i.e. trying to get the bees to gradually expand /
migrate from the National box to the Warre via an adapter, because I've tried
it and Ann Welch has tried it and it doesn't work.]
On reflection I think it has to be a "shook swarm" because if you transfer
ANY brood comb, the bees will build their nest in the Warre around that and
you will end up with a horrendous mess, probably starting with an
uninspectable welded-together mass of comb in the bottom box and the bees
building randomly and very slowly above that. So sacrifice the brood. Shake
and brush the bees in to the Warre: it is probably best to do this about an
hour before sunset so they have no option but to stay there (and block the
entrance so they can't get out that night, but allow some ventilation). Let
the brood die from cold overnight then let the bees salvage stores from the
old comb.
This is the best time of year to do a shook swarm, because the colony / queen
is healthy and the brood losses are relatively low. The colony lifecycle is
programmed to build up numbers now so this loss of brod is a bump in the
road, not a car crash. An incidental benefit of a shook swarm is that it gets
rid of 90% of any varroa there may have been, because they tend to be in the
capped brood. The sooner you do it the more time the colony has to rebuild
and and grow strong this year.
Paul
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