There is a lot of trouble to be found out there on the internet. You don't have to look very far to see things, read things that you wish that you had never seen or read. Some of it is wickedness. Some of it is more innocuous, like a song you hear that, like a brain worm, gets stuck in your head and is on a non-stop loop! Argghh...
But there are other things, specifically on You Tube, that are marvelous. I recently looked up how to build a nuc. A "nuc" is a nucleus colony. It is a small colony used by beekeepers to raise new hives. The former president of our bee club told us he loves to make splits into nucs. It is his opinion that bee colonies grow faster in nucs. He feels that they like to fill small spaces quickly.
After not many clicks, I found plans and was busy with my cut list. The best part was it was free. Everything needed to make it I already had on hand from the screws to the 1 x 12 that I had up in the rafters in the barn leftover from a project ten years ago. I am not a carpenter. My cuts aren't square. The finished product is never pretty. But I've found over the years that the animals don't care, and I don't think the honeybees will care either. It didn't take long and the nuc was finished.
This is a five frame nuc.
There's the nuc in all her glory, ready for action.
I'm going to pull out two of the frames and use the nuc as a swarm trap. This is peak swarm season. I'll show you how I baited it in a couple of minutes.
I set the nuc in the crook of a big live oak tree, facing south and in the shade.
The nuc in the crook of the tree is approximately 30 feet from the colony that is currently living in the hollow fiberglass column you see below. Every year, the bees fill up the column with comb and then they swarm. The old queen, with half the hive leave. This year when it happens, I want to catch them. That's our goal.
The first thing you want to have in your swarm trap is frames with old drawn comb. Bees smell it and they feel comfortable where bees used to be.
The second thing you want to use in your swarm trap is an attractant. We use lemongrass oil. Bees love it as it resembles the pheromone that the queen puts out. We put a couple of dashes of lemongrass oil on a cotton ball, put it in a zip loc bag, leaving a crack in the bag. We put it in the back of the box. It acts as a slow release attractant. We also put a couple drops of lemongrass oil at the entrance.
In this photo, you can see the nuc swarm trap in the crook of the tree along with the swarm trap we've baited in the deep box. We've since moved this swarm trap to the back yard by the four bee boxes. We watched a swarm leave one of the boxes and they are balled up forty feet up in the branches of the tree. We put the swarm trap right beneath it. In no time we had many scout bees checking out both of the swarm traps.
We are hoping to be successful in catching swarms coming off of our hives or catch some wild swarms to bring some new genetics into our hives. We'll keep you posted if we have some swarms moving in.
No comments:
Post a Comment