Very simple colony retrival and interesting

[mike91553]

I had a call from a man with bees hanging on a tree branch 5 feet high but after talking to him we determined it was not a swarm. I went down yesterday and this is what I found. The colony appears to be about the size of a 5 frame nuc



http://photobucket.com/airealhoneybeecolony

[Wally]

Very neat. Thanks for posting.

[mike91553]

I had seen pictures but this is the first one I saw for real. The homeowner mows his yard within a few feet but only noticed them last week. I may be wrong but estimated a swarm probably came there in May. Judging from the weight I think they would have starved by Christmas.

I have one hive at home that is a top-bar hive. I am mainly just keeping it as a novelty but it now has laying workers but plenty of good comb and honey. I would like to put these bees on that comb without losing the queen. My first step today was to move the queenless hive over a few feet and place the hive box with the branch and comb in that location.

Next I suppose I need to shake off all the bees in the queenless hive and then shake the bees off the branch into that hive and move it back to the original spot.

Another option might be to kill all the bees in the queenless hive first since they are all older workers anyway but then I would have too small a colony for the amount of comb and space.

Any other ideas?

[Wally]

I would cage the queen, then cut out the brood and attach it to new top bars and install it and the bees into the tbh.

Then I would shake all the queenless bees off onto the ground 20 feet in front of the location.

I would then put the comb back into the tbh, install the queen and release her 3 days later.

[ski]

Mike,
Now that is cool.
Building comb in the open would have made me have a concern that they were somewhat africanized, but it doesn't sound like they were aggressive.
Cool pictures.