Catch Free Honey Bees! : DIY Honey Bee Swarm Traps

oh my gosh well I'd say the Swarm trap was a success so far what's up y'all welcome back to the Quinn stat today I'm going to be showing you how I made these swarm traps on the cheap and ended up catching three honeybee swarms I started with grabbing some old buckets and this trash can that were about to be thrown away at my parents house I also grabbed a couple kitty litter jugs a couple broken flower pots and a broken chicken water since these were all pretty dirty this kitty litter one smelled like kitty litter and this one smelled like rotted pickles for some reason I grabbed some fragrance free dish detergent and started out by giving these guys a good scrub down to get them nice and clean [Music] I then went ahead and set them out to dry and while they were drying I grabbed some beeswax I bought at the local farmers market chopped it up into little bits put it on the barbecue to get it nice and melted down then I grabbed a paintbrush and started coating the inside of all my buckets with a nice layer of beeswax not only will this help attract the bees to our buckets but it'll give them a good surface to walk around on and it'll also provide a surface they'll be able to start building their comb onto the next thing I needed to do was figure out how I was going to attach these to the trees so I went over to my trusty scrap wood pile got a bunch of pieces of scrap wood and basically what I did was put a longer piece on the outside and a shorter piece of wood on the inside and screwed them together sandwiching the buckets in between each piece of wood on the exterior plank I drilled a hole through the top and the bottom to give us a good mounting point to nail these onto the tree [Music] or the trash can I grabbed a used piece of plywood took some calaised screws and just screwed it straight onto the board then using a three-quarter inch drill bit I drilled a three-quarter inch hole in the lids of all the buckets with these flower pots I wanted to conjoin them together to give it a bigger surface on the inside but first I needed to figure out how I was going to hang it from the tree so I grabbed a stick an old piece of wire drilled a hole for the top stuck the wire through wrapped it around the stick and did the same thing for the other side I then used some heavy duty duct tape to duct tape both of those pots together I also duct tape shut any holes I didn't want the bees going through and then drilled out the main hole I did want these one for the chicken water I just attached the base to a board and then screwed on the top to the base now that we've got our swarm traps made it's time to put a lure inside I picked up this lemongrass oil from the local farmers market I put a few drops on a cotton ball put that cotton ball inside of a sandwich bag to help prevent it from evaporating too fast and put those inside of each one of our swarm traps with all the Swarm traps ready to go it's time to start hanging these guys up since this is the first time we've ever caught bees we weren't quite sure on exactly where to put them so we put them in all sorts of places we put some way back in the woods we put some near a creek we put some near where we knew there were active bees we hung some higher up in trees and some lower and since this is sort of an experiment I went ahead and took three swarm traps and I headed in town I put this one in my parents backyard this other one I put in the back of the Woods next to a park in their neighborhood and the last one I went ahead and followed this Trail through the back of their neighborhood until I got to a clearing and I put the Swarm trap on the edge of that clearing foreign within just a few days we had a lot of interest in the Swarm traps from honeybees we even had some bees starting to build wax on the outside of the Swarm traps and then we waited and waited and then after waiting for over a month finally this happened oh my gosh all right guys this is insane y'all we got one they did not colonize inside the bucket though they're on the outside they've already built giant Combs on here I'm so freaking excited and then a month after we caught that swarm we caught another one and then three or four months after we caught that swarm we caught one more and the common factor between the three swarms that we caught was that they were all the Swarm traps that we put in town my brother came up with a really good theory on why this might have happened but you're gonna have to wait to hear that until the next B video where we take those swarm traps down bring them back to the homestead and get those guys moved into a bee box and you're not going to want to miss this one because things start to get a little weird so make sure you stick around to see what happens [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Home On The Quinnstead

Views: 24,172

Keywords: bee swarm trap, build a swarm trap, building swarm traps, catch free bees, diy honey bee swarm trap, diy swarm trap, free bees, honey bee swarm trap, honeybee swarm trap, how to make a bee swarm trap, how to make a swarm trap, swarm trap, swarm trap build, swarm trap success, swarm trapping honey bees, swarm traps, swarm traps and bait hives, bait hives, bait hives for honey bees, bait hive design, setting swarm traps, how to get free bees, swarm traps for honey bees

Id: dW2WlzvUwzs

Length: 5min 14sec (314 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 08 2022