Is it possible to merge a queen less swarm of bees with a cut out using a bee vac? Let's find out.

hello it's Mr Ed and Good Time Charlie and today where are we today John don't walk away walk away come here Tony where are we today talk this morning absolutely I have no idea I slept on the way over here well Charlie let me inform you okay we are in the retirement community of christwood today sound like a place I need to be and and it's uh it's in Madisonville which is about 10 miles from yeah it's close and we got a call from the maintenance department saying that they have bees up on the second story balcony of one of the units so Charlie would you get over there and show us where the bees are and Charlie it's up there yeah Charlie's going to show you where the bees are so that's where the bees are coming into the building up on the second story now as Charlie pans down and you can see where I'm standing down here yep the Second Story and for us to do that removal uh it's not gonna it's not gonna be done from the balcony itself uh for that we have a lift Coming For That but I'm hoping that this Colony B is going to be a relatively new swarm that has just moved in and I'm pretty sure that is going to be the case for this one um the maintenance department for this facility is very um on top of things so I'm really thinking these bees have been here a month six weeks so in that that's the case it's not going to be a huge established Colony as of yet so because of that I have a I I have something I want to try today yesterday I was called out to Slidell which isn't about 30 miles from The Abbey to retrieve a swarm and the Swarm was on the ground and when I when I was told that the Swarm was on the ground uh the person that called me Trudy the lady that called me I told her I said the chances are if the bees are on the on the ground like that I mean they were on the side of the road in fact look here's a picture of that swarm so that was the picture of of the song it was a nice one probably about four or five pounds of bees in there and like I told the lady if there's if the bees are on the ground like that the chances are very good that the queen of that Hive of that swarm is either injured or dead and as it turned out she was dead so that was yesterday eating about 4 35 o'clock I vacuumed all the bees up in the everything be back and with the queen knowing that she was dead I was gonna have to merge them with another Colony or get a queen and it's kind of hard to get Queens right now so what I decided to do is since we had this removal today and hopefully it'll be a small enough removal we are just going to vacuum these bees right here into that same box into the same bag that the bees are already in those bees in the back right now they know they're queenless they've been queenless at least for 24 hours there is not going to be any issue with these bees right here joining with them and then these bees accepting this queen so by the grace of God this little experiment is going to work out and we're going to be taking these bees back up into the Attic So Charlie you ready to Wrangle I'm ready to go let's do this thing and these are the the bees that I vacuumed yesterday and Charlie come take it see if we can get a look on the side of there like I said it's probably about three four pounds of bees inside of here and I'm hoping that the bees up here uh won't overcrowd these being that it won't be too large of a swarm up there and it'll all work out just fine all right the lift is here Charlie is here with a camera I think it's time to go upstairs and take off that fascia board and show where these bees are [Music] [Music] there it is folks and just as I had hoped pretty small colony uh probably six weeks eight weeks at the most I don't even think it's eight weeks since they haven't built out probably any comb at all but we'll be able to get these girls in the be vac comb in a frame by the greasy guy we're gonna find that Queen and get these two colonies merged up together we had some beauty for sure for sure look at that all the comb has all been removed I didn't see the queen on any of the cone but with all these bees in these in here somewhere that's amazing see it is see where our Queen is well folks it's like it was never there before and it ain't bad no more unfortunately I vacuumed that doggone Queen I don't know how I didn't see her but I I guess it's just all them bees I was vacuuming I got her well no Queen but she's in inside the B vac so for that thank you Jesus and our comb right here this stuff is all frameable probably get at least two frames out of this so we're headed up to The Abbey right now we're gonna get this stuff framed up and turn these bees loose and hopefully we'll find that queen as she marches in ready to go to the average ready to go to that we're up to do it now before we get um started releasing those bees first I'm going to show you um what we'll put inside of this box is just a bunch of comb and there comb and my comb so it's just a frame with a little bit of honey on it this is one of the frames of their comb clean that up another frame with a bit of honey on it now checkerboard them just because I don't want them to be falling on each other this is another frame of honey that I put in there there's their comb the frame of honey they're cone another frame of honey and there come and it one last just a little comb really comb and I know it's kind of not right to split up The Brood pattern like that um but for this purpose I don't I don't think I think we'll be fine with it um they'll the bees will work it all out and we're not that too I'm not too concerned with that so we got this is the the layout of the box from our bees that we vacuumed but before we vacuum US release those bees onto the ground right here right here these are bees that Charlie and I took out of Mississippi out of Picayune Mississippi on Saturday and our Queen she's in the bottom right here she needs to be turned loose released but before but before I do that let me take one more uh mention on June 17th 2023 I'll be the keynote speaker over at the Texas Beekeepers Association in Conroe Texas so I'll leave a site um for those interested in getting tickets for that I'll leave it uh um an address in the description of the video on that for the Texas Beekeepers Association summer Clinic all right let's go ahead and release this queen in here this this Hive had 50 000 bees in it and I had to put this second Super on it right away because there weren't there just wasn't enough space in that and I killed a beetle real quick right there I saw another one too all right so these bees are just cleaning up this is just old brood comb right here they're cleaning up that mess I'm gonna take this off of here because like my queen is in that bottom box [Music] and here she is on this Frame right here oh and her a loose foreign she's been caged up in here now since Saturday so that's Sunday Monday Tuesday three to three days let's see if we can find her in there there she is right here there you go good shot of her right there I'm just gonna open up the cage hopefully I'll be able to see her walk out and wait until she gets to the by there she goes on the bottom there she goes she already went in so fast went right on down all right let me drop in a couple of frames of Honey on this one now and close this one back up and what I'm going to do is I'll just remove the screen on the top right here and look on this part to see if any Our Queen is on this part and and if I don't see it then I'll bounce that in and the reason I do that is because that way it gets our bees started to go into our box Charlie get a shot of it all those bees in there and and you remember we merged these bees with the bees that were in there already so it's going to be an easy way of doing that in fact I'm going to put most of these because I can't I can't see if my queen is on here I'm gonna drop these in here because if my queen is on here I don't want her I want to try to capture Here Charlie that's just too many beads for me to look for foreign take any chances all right I don't see you here so we're gonna bounce these girls into it yeah and it's kind of just like starts the bees to want to get into the box they'll go down and then when I set these bees down on the ground it'll just encourage them to go in my goodness that is a bees we'll just get them to start going in and they're going to go into that box episode foreign very few of them comparatively did not make it whether they were on the bottom of that heat of that heat pile in Paris that way or I vacuumed dead bees but needless to say the idea of merging these two colonies at the same time it it worked fine we just got to get them to get in the box now go ahead and dump out some more bees these little bees that are running to the outside all I do is push them in and then they're gonna just wind up running over to the masses of the bees and once this batch gets thinned out a little bit you see them they're just all prowling up on the box I'll dump another load of bees into them it's going to take a little while we're going to just set the bucket down and let these see if these bees will just crawl out on their own foreign [Music] [Music] thank you foreign and that is two inches of bees on the face of this board we run into the box from up here see if I can find it that way you think we got some bees in here folks me that's good that's wrong I don't think I found it because those bees are going in the box now there's a good chance you walked in on the first bounce so we'll be able to tell about Fanning once that starts happening but one thing you definitely can tell there was no issue about merging the bees that I vacuumed yesterday and these today they that one I did yesterday it was queenless in fact Charlie so this over here this is the cage that I just released the other Queen with and this is how strong Queen pheromone is these bees are searching for pheromone and look here's a drone be right here and this is the cage that we just turned that other Queen loose and so look how it attracts the bees over amazing well we know there's no Queen in here but there was a queen in there and look I mean there's bees all over this that Queen's not in there because you know she's not but it's it's pretty cool how they operate like that all right all right here we are what are we doing I have no idea we're gonna we're gonna end up this video I gotta I got a box of bees right here next to me oh this was it it was quite an experience today emerging two two groups of bees together because one was queenless in fact speaking of Queen this Charlie when I went through that pile of dead ones here's here's our no way yeah yeah I pulled her out I found her and there's our dead Queen from the Swarm yesterday so now we've got we got us another new queen and a bunch of other bees to carry on huh yeah it does work so it really did did work to merge them right then and there uh there there might be I don't know a hundred bees that didn't make the trip and these could have been overheated bees like I said and died or I vacuumed them dead but for the most part man I'm very very happy uh and we have a lot of bees in this box yeah there really are a lot of bees and and then I'm gonna I'm gonna wait about three or four days and then I'll come back up in here and I'll search for our our Queens yeah so what else Tom that's about it thanks for watching keep on watching we'll be making more God bless this Mr Eden and Good Time Charlie around here until the next video God bless [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Jeff Horchoff Bees

Views: 25,626

Keywords: Merging a swarm of bees with a cut out...using a bee vac., catching honey bee swarms, capturing honey bee swarms, honey bees cut outs, honey bee nest removal, how to honey bee removal, honey bee infestation, removing bee hives, removing bee hives from house, removing bee hives without killing, merging bee hives, queen bees, releasing a queen bee, queen pheromone, bee vacuum design, bee vacuum, everything bee vacuum, everything bee vacuum gen2.5 - basic, jeff horchoff bees

Id: w__5G-spuvQ

Length: 23min 37sec (1417 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023