Just had what I think was a successful collection of a swarm.
Got a call from an absentee londlord who had a swarm under/in the insulation of a trailer flooor. It had been there a year. Trailer was about 18 inches off the ground.
Cleared it out today. This is what I did.
Spread a large tarp on the ground to keep things neat. Took every tool imaginable plus all my bee keeping stuff.
Made myself a bee vac out of two 5 gallon buckets and a shop vac (if any one is interested send me email separately and I'll try to explain how I did it). Don't know how to do pictures on email so --
Went to the trailer and slowly vacumed the bees up - the trick is to have just enough suction to collect the bees but not harm them. Spent about 10 - 15 minutes just vacuming bees - till I couldn't find any more.
Then I reached in and broke/cut the combs out. Each time I took out comb More bees were uncovered so I just vacumed them up - ended up with about 2 - 3 gallons of bees.
Put the comb in frames trying to make sure I had them orientated same way they originally were. used rubber bands to hold them in the frames.
Eventually got about 3 - 4 frames of brood - the cells seemed smaller than my brood 1 - 2 frames of pollen, and 5 - 6 frames of empty comb. Put all of it in frames and in a full sized brood box. Found NO honey at all. Ended up with 10 full frames of stuff.
After every frame I took out - I vacumed. And after all frames were out I vacumed again 4 or 5 times waiting about 5 - 10 minutes between vacumes to let bees collect. When I left there were no bees on the bottom of the trailer and anly a few flying around outside.
Never did see the queen. I probably vacumed her up and probalby hurt her. Don't know will check in a few days.
Came home, set up the hive in the bee yard, dumped all the bees on top of the combs I had rubber banded, gave them a jar of 50 % honey and water, and ran Like hell.
Incidently I did not get stung once during the entier operation. I usually do.
Topic: Collecting swarm from trailer (Read 1701 times)