How To Keep Your Hived Swarm From Leaving, By Using a Hive Entrance Queen Excluder.
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- Опубликовано: 22 май 2023
- There are many options when it comes to trying to keep a newly hived swarm of honey bees in their new home.
In this video, I share what it looks like when they are not settled and showing signs of leaving.
Many of us bring a swarm home, put them in to a new hive box only to see that hive empty in a day or two.
Some beekeepers find the queen when they are collecting the swarm, and place her in a Queen-Cage until the colony is well settled.
This video demonstrates another option.
Once you are certain that the queen is inside the hive, you can place this Queen Excluder over the entire entrance.
It's important to continue your observations so you can determine if they are indeed bringing in resources, or just waiting you out until the barrier is removed.
When you see bees bringing pollen and other resources into the hive, as well as demonstrating housekeeping behaviors, they are likely now your bees.
Warning -
If you use a queen excluder over the entrance to keep the bees until they have settled, you still need to remove it after 72 hours just in case they are with a virgin queen.
A virgin queen can often be at the center of smaller swarms, and she will need to be able to complete her mating flight before you will see pollen and brood rearing activities.
I hope you find this video helpful.
The Queen Excluder that I've demonstrated here is available by clicking this link: www.dadant.com/catalog/entran...
The above link is not an affiliate link. Please be sure to tell them Frederick Dunn sent you so you can be assured to pay the same as everyone else :)
If you want to learn more about Flow-Hives, please follow this link:
www.fredsfinefowl.com/theflow...
I put a queen excluder on my hive when I installed a new 3lb package. I'm new to bee keeping so they had no drawn comb. I kept it on until I saw comb and larvae in the frames. You say they can pull the dead bees through, but they can't pull dead drones until the fall apart. So when I removed the excluder they hauled out dozens of dead drones within like an hour.
Modern problems require modern solutions. Very clever.
I rescued a huge colony yesterday from a early 60s tow trucks gas tank that’s mounted behind the seat. The fuel cap was missing and they were entering through the fuel filler tube. I brought the fuel tank home and lag bolted it to my hive stand last night. Instead of cutting them out of the tank I’m going to remove the filler tube and attach a 2 1/4” hose to it and cut the same size hole in the Langstroth hive on my stand and attach the other end to the back of the hive. They’ll have to travel through the hose and through the hive to get outside to forage. I’m hoping they’ll eventually build comb in the Langstroth hive. The honey from this old leaded gasoline hive will put lead in your pencil.
Wow, what a great series of events! I hope it all goes the way you want it to. Trapouts are a game of patience for sure.
Fred, this is such a good video in so many ways. Your ability to present best practices, while acknowledging all the different scenarios is just so helpful. I never would have thought that a recently hived swarm would have had the potential to abscond fairly quickly. Makes sense why the videos I watch keep the queen in a cage for a bit. But the great photography and sound really makes a difference. Nice solution to this possible scenario.
Fred, I LOVE that you put the slow-motion segments in! Thank you! They are amazing!
You're very welcome :)
Always things to learn at Fred’s place. Thanks professor. Always fun.
i have one,unused sofar,there have been times i look at a hive w frantic activity, then after some time,....its all calm,thanks for sharing to recognize changes and what it could mean,always good to have options
Way cool Fred, I like the excluder placement.😁NO swarming for you🤣and dam the drones.😂Have a great day Fred, thanks for sharing.
I saw a video once. In a few cases on swarming bees. Sometimes, they want to leave the location. For they assume the area is undesirable for the amount of bees currently at the location that humans put them. Might be a good topic on your podcast!
Love the photography and the narrative. Great stuff for reducing anxiety.
Thank you :)
This was SO helpful to watch! Thank you! I feel smarter today from watching it🐝
Glad it was helpful!
Great lesson, thanks for sharing.
Thank you for sharing more amazing footage. I was wondering about the gap between the landing board and the bottom of the queen excluder.
Nice video, another way to keep a swarm from leaving is to give them a frame (from another hive) with some eggs and brood.
True, just one of many tools :)
Thats very good Ive got a kind of that with some boxes I bought. A queen excluder! I thought it was for the rats coming in. Rhat cluld neen thst you could get a much larger hive, easier. You can fix the queens by making the swarms your self. You get them were you want them too.
I've used this method before and i will keep using it with any swarm i get in the future .
Very Informative, Educational as intended. Learning all the time. Thank you
Thanks Peter :)
Very nice well done good presentation good examples. Thank you for taking the time to do this and share it with us.
You're welcome, Chip :)
Thanks again still on the road In Split today beautiful world
Well done Fred. Makes me wonder if they had this technology 100 years ago what would be found about the world of bees. Again thank you for sharing this
Hi Rick, I'm often impressed by some of the tools we use today that were actually also used in the 1800s. Even the Hive Visors I put on the hive fronts were actually in use more than a hundred years ago. We seem to come full circle on some things.
@@FrederickDunn people in Europe have been using them and long landing boards too. We have a lot to learn from the people in Poland ,Slovenian and Croatia.
I learn so much from you! Thank you. ❤
That's great news! Thank you Misty :)
Hi Fred, Well, I finally got my bees. They were estimated to arrive on Monday! You may remember that I ordered two pkgs of Russian Hybrids from MannLake. One was in OK shape; the other DOA. The queen being dead, I ordered a replacement. There were over 2" of dead bees. I feel like a memorial service should be held:( Good thing is MannLake gave me a complete refund on BOTH pkgs. The new queen will be overnighted to me. I put a QMP strip in that hive.There are some live bees but not many.
Russian Hybrids are supposed to be well-mannered bees, and if they are all like the ones I received, I totally agree. Such sweet bees, truly. My queen should arrive next week.
I'm glad they refunded you for the package and are replacing the queen. But you really don't know the disposition of the genetics until your queens populate the hive. The workers that are in the package are often not from the same genetics as the queen.
At 21:12 they make a turn for the better and decide to stay.
Fred....thank you so much....the slo-mo is so instructive....lt would be interesting to see a demographic of your viewership. l am 86y-o...non keeper...and probably never will, but totally into the whole beek-thing!!! BTW did you notice that Catherine, Princes of Wales is an armature bee keeper? Thanks again for the excitement and knowledge you pass on.
Hi Barbara, thank you so much for watching even though you may never have your own bees. I really do appreciate the compliments! :)
Weather permitting 70 degrees or less I’ll just staple window screen to box for a couple of days. I believe those bees had another home in mind
Hello Mister Frederik 🥰🥰🥰🥰 🐝🐝🐝🐝
@frederic Dunn: there is more music in this tool: in winter it can work as a perfect mice protection. In Europe it can help to defend against attacks from the asiatic hornet.
Thank you, answered some questions for me.
You're welcome, Joanne :)
Fred this was great I have cought swarms and they left and I have cought swarms and they stayed u just tought me what to look for and u also told me the drones would be ok I caught a big one last month a lady called me she lived about 5 miles from me in town and said she had bees in her tree it was the biggest swarm I have ever seen or caught I use the butterfly net that u had showed in a video a long time ago it was just as easy as pie with the net. I had to use a tall 10 ft ladder and the net was a life saver Last weekend I was checking hives doing inspections andf 1 of my hives was just going crazy they were not swarming I had removed the q so they would make a new one her pattern was bad. do the bees act crazy when a new q goes out and gets mated and comes back. I watched them and they calmed down in about 10 min I guess, the other hives were just as calm it was like night and day the difference. any way Fred this video was great thanks so very much for making it I hope u have a Blessed week
Hi Frances, yes! I've really enjoyed watching those increased activities on landing boards when the queen returns from a mating flight. It's conspicuous and loud. You're right, unless you're there to see it they calm down and you'd never know. When queens return from a mating flight they tend to collect a number of foragers from other colonies that simply tag-along and join her. It's fun to observe and explains the sudden population increase we often see when a queenless colony gets one and she returns mated.
@@FrederickDunn it was so cool Fred Thanks
I have used this to prevent too many drones reentering the hive.
Superb video skills. Definitely Discover Channel quality. I never knew my fat little girls were so beautiful and graceful in flight. It is almost as if I can actually smell the cedar.
21:25 you could clearly see that in the beginning a bee draged a dead bee outside
Love your videos as always Fred. Had a few questions:
1) I was confused about the excluder preventing a swarm’s virgin queen from exiting and getting mated. I thought swarms always left w the old (and thus mated) queen. Perhaps not always?
2. When they’re attempting to leave, you show (1:30) bees w butts in air releasing Nasonov pheromone. I always associated that w a “good” sign, where they’re signaling the swarm “here’s home”. But in this case, it seems it’s also used to signal for the bees to swarm/abscond?
3. You mention you know the queen is mated, and to jump ahead to 16/17min mark to hear how. I guess it wasn’t clear to me how you knew, and I didn’t see anything at 16/17 to explain (perhaps I missed it.)
Thanks for making these videos. Learning a lot!
Afterswarms occur fairly often, and when those happen the queen that goes with them hasn't had time to become mated, so it's why you often find small swarms that aren't very settled. When bees are trying to keep a group from the same colony together as when swarming, you see those nasanov glands going. Watch a swarm departing a hive and you'll see them lining the landing board. I didn't intend to say that the queen was mated, but rather that the colony is settled on this location based on the change in activity you can observe on the landing board. A mated queen inspires the workers to prepare for brood, so when you see lots of pollen coming after hiving a swarm, it's a pretty good indicator that she's been mated and likely to be laying.
Did you notice the bees above the frame? They are telling each other to swarm. The horseshoe people call it. When the bees start doing the horseshoe swarming is about to happen. I have used queen excluders in the front of my hives for years just for a week or two. I don’t use queen excluders for their normal use.
I'm with you, Ronald I don't use queen excluders inside the hive. :)
Wonderful and relevant video. 😊. I wonder whether bees can bring in pollen through the bars? I ask because of the queen frame isolation cages … I’m using a frame isolation cage for a captured queen that I will replace with a purchased queen when she comes in.
I provided close ups of bees bringing pollen through the excluder in this video :) So, your answer is yes they can :)
I saw a couple bees struggling to get through the excluder. Fat bees? Maybe drones.
Maybe that's why many beekeepers don't like to use them.
I caught a swarm the other day and noticed some scouts looking at the hive location that were black and a bit larger than my Italian bees.
I don't think they would fit through this excluder.
I don't use queen excluders on my hives, at the very best, they slow progress :)
@@FrederickDunn With the effort it took for some of the ladies to get through, I can see how it would. I saw another video from Bob Binnie a while back that showed his been going through effortlessly and seeing that large black scout the other day, I wonder how much a difference it makes between subspecies that the excluder makes.
I have them installed on my hives that have started collecting excess honey now. I started them from NUCs last month and they have been growing like crazy.
These guys are so fascinating.
Hay what books do you recommend for starter bee keepers like do a whole q&a on books about bee keeping.
Starting at the 8:00 minute mark, there appears to be one bee with pollin climbing up the front of the landing board, then remaining on the board where it starts fanning like the other bees facing the entrance. Hardly an indicator of foraging, but ...
I noticed that as well.
Remember that when they gather pollen, if the colony is preparing to swarm, they don't deposit the pollen in a cell, instead they depart with the swarm. It's a concensus activity. Good eye!
Interesting 😮 I wouldn’t of thought of that… I know from the past.. once the girls get it in their heads they are leaving? It’s 99% impossible to keep them in the hive o placed them in.z❤
This isn't for stopping a swarm from a resident colony, it's my opinion that it works best for recently hived swarms. A resident colony that needs to swarm will have new queens in the making, so I don't recommend it for that purpose.
I am from Algeria, North Africa. I am a beekeeper specialized in leading beehives. I am looking for a job in the field of beekeeping
I hope you are successful in finding employment with a beekeeping operation.
I don't know if it's true or not but on my yard 25 Hives I don't have too much tissue on the bees wanting to leave. And when I come out of winter I have 15 to 20 last year I had 30 counting nukes and right before it got cold I had three leaves
I have caught them and go to the box they come out of take the queen sails out and put them right back in with the queen in a cage and sometimes it takes a day or two chill out
Yes, if you can find the queen, lots of swarm gatherers put her in a cage and keep her inside the hive until they settle, with the QE front, you don't have to open the hive again as you do with the queen in her cage. I consider this method to be less invasive than caging the queen. Plus, while you're waiting she can actually begin laying if there is drawn comb.
Mr. Fred, This question isn't related to this video, but what was the brand of red motion activated light with siren that was on one or more of your other video's?
HULPPRE Solar Outdoor Motion Sensor Alarm 129db
@FrederickDunn Thank You Sir, suspected Fox dug into my chicken run last night and took my favorite little Serama rooster named Buckaroo.
I saw one of Randy’s latest removals. He does the varroa counts on all cutouts. This one had a count of two. He mentioned that this was not uncommon with his feral colonies and cut outs. Do you think beekeeping could be improved by breeding these feral and hygienic queens? Do you think AI could be a benefit with this while using feral drones from a different apiary, keeping genetic diversity?
Are you talking about Dirt Rooster? Tell him to count the varroa on the drones in spring. The numbers may actually be higher than you think. :)
Yes, I saw that on a grub survey. No mites on worker brood but 50% of drone grubs had mating pairs or were reproductive capable.
Pull 100 worker grubs, count the mites, label as active or breeding etc and go to the chart for assessment. 5 on the scale was gonna be really bad 0-1 not so bad. Thanks Fred.
I know you say to keep this queen excluder on the entrance no more than 72 hours but I don't recall you saying in the video how long it took this particular hive to settle to the point where the excluder could be removed. What is a more typical length of time for them to settle? Thx.
They were bringing in pollen within 48 hours of the queen excluder being put on the hive. The swarm was hived the day before the queen excluder was placed.
Okay, so swarm hived on day 1, excluder added on day 2, excluder removed on day 4. Thx.
If the queen has been starved lost weight can she fit thru the excluder drones won’t get out , if she can’t get out what happens when the daughters hatch or do they pull the cells of daughters down? You sorta answered later
For virgin queens, you'll be removing the excluder once they have settled. There have been some cases where undersized (likely malnourished) queens have been able to get through queen excluders, but that's extremely rare because it's the thorax that prevents them from getting through. When I say malnourished I'm referring to their growth and development.
@@FrederickDunn thanks for clarifying Frederick 👍❤️❤️❤️🙏
Fred is the gap at the bottom to big as the landing board slants ?
No, I commented on that during the video, it's the same size as the bar spacing above.
They were picky bees...Fred excluded them into submission!
Stockholm syndrome, if you keep them long enough they may just decide to stay with you :)
@@FrederickDunn IC you are practicing for those unannounced visitors?!
It’s like dogs and cats in heat I suppose
?
Yet again human knows better what is good for the bees. Jailed bees, so sad.😪
You are very welcome to your opinion, and you certainly have choices. Are you also considering that if they flew off on their own their chances of survival are very small. These are managed colonies of bees, and considered livestock. Considering that their chances of survival are almost guaranteed by preventing the queen's escape, then in this case yes "human knows better" if you want them to live. If you consider this to be bee jail, then your course is made, don't use any restrictions at all. I wish you all the best no matter what decision you make for bees in your care.
@@FrederickDunn You say "Considering that their chances of survival are almost guaranteed by preventing the queen's escape, then in this case yes "human knows better" if you want them to live." You must be joking, how many bee colonies die every winter due to human mismanagement? I think they are better off on their own. Too much human intervention is bad considering that we don't know much about the life of the bee colony. That is obviously my opinion. I do listen to your friday talks and generally speaking you might be helpfull to new beekeepers, however you seem to suffer very popular disease that concerns many youtubers/celebrities. You think you figured it all out. Rest assured you did not, try to be a little more humble in your opinions. Wish you success in your beekeeping.
Shut up man. His videos are informative and very helpful. Thanks for sharing Fred. Pffft