After we had no success with the swarm trap attracting the scout bees that eventually brought over a swarm that located into our column on the side porch, I moved the swarm trap back to where we had caught a swarm last year. It seems to be the 'sweet spot' (pardon the pun) for catching swarms. It's between the navel orange tree and the garden. It's right near the water trough and garden.
It's not really an official swarm trap. It's merely a normal deep box with five frames of foundation in it, one of which has old drawn out comb. To the back of the box, I dropped a cotton ball that I had dropped two drops of lemongrass essential oil on. Lemongrass oil mimics the pheromone that the queen bee gives off and attracts the bees. The very next day, we had scout bees checking the place out!
Can you see them flying in?
They kept coming and coming. It wasn't a huge swarm, but it qualified as a box of bees in my book. I took the top off and peered inside. I was pretty confident the queen was in there, although I couldn't find her.
They are fun creatures to watch. You immediately understand how the term "as busy as a bee" came about. These bees are doing some housecleaning. They are primarily on the old frame and are cleaning the comb. Once they get it clean, the bees will start building out more comb.
In a day or two, the queen will be all ready to begin laying eggs. The aptly named worker bees are getting the work done.
I waited until night time and shined a light in the box. It was full of bees, so I moved the box off of the ladder and sat it on top of some cinder blocks near our other two boxes of bees. I got a queen excluder and put it on the bottom, right above the bottom board. The queen excluder keeps the queen from flying off. It will allow the other bees to come and go, but is a little too small to allow the queen to fit though.
You can see all the bees lining the entrances of the (now) three hives. Here's the plan. I'll check the new box for eggs in two days and see if I can locate any eggs. Once there are eggs, the queen will, in all likelihood not leave, so once I see eggs, I'll remove the queen excluder.
On Saturday I opened the new box and spotted eggs. We have a laying queen! Guess what we did? We set the swarm trap out again!
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