It's been awhile since I actually did a beekeeping blog post. Here is something that I've now tried three times with success so I figured I'd pass it along. In the months of September and October I did a lot of removals. I try to avoid anything in the building structure, there is simply too much liability in tearing up someone's house. I will, on occasion, do a removal from soffit or if I know the homeowner I might get a bit more involved. I've had pretty good success lately in finding the queen, I'd estimate 90% or better. What I typically do when I find the queen is cage her and put in whatever box I'm using. Usually a 5 frame nuc. I put comb in frames with rubber bands, put in a few thousand bees then just leave the box right where the colony was, and the bees are typically inside by dark. Sometimes I can't find the queen and so either I'll vacuum up as many bees as possible, or put as many bees as I can in a box with comb and leave it there, hoping that maybe the queen is already in the box. This has worked several times, apparently I had her but just did not see her. But on at least three removals I was not so lucky. One was in soffit. I put bees in the box with comb, left the box on the roof and went back at dark. When I left, bees were going in so I thought she was in there. Went back and there were several large clusters where comb used to be. So the queen was not in the box. Another was a water meter box. I really enjoy doing these, I think finding the queen here is better than 90%. But I did one and could not find a queen. In fact I found no eggs but a lot of brood from day 3 or 4 on. Looked like they lost the queen a couple of days before I got there. Again I tried putting comb in a box, took all of the old comb out of the meter box and went back in the evening. More than half of the bees were clustered in a corner of the meter box. And the third one was something I did just last weekend. Bees in a compartment of a camper trailer. They had several very thick honey combs and some broke off as soon as I lifted the cover. Searched for quite some time and did not find her. Put a lot of bees in the box with comb. Watched for a while and others were going in. Went back that evening and inside of the trailer there were several large clusters all around. So in each of these cases I was certain the queen was not in the box. And as they were not in a single cluster, there was no queen. If there was still a queen, the bees would be in a single cluster. Being that I raise queens and had some mated in the bank box, I tried an experiment. I went back and put one of my mated queens in a frame and taped the end so they could not chew the candy plug. In all three cases, when I went back the next evening, all of the bees were in the box. Now you may say this works for me because I make queens, but it can work for anyone else too. I have for a long time advocated that every beekeeper should have a five frame nuc in every apiary they operate. It's a resource hive. You move brood frames every 1 or 2 weeks to build up production colonies and you always have an emergency queen. Should anyone find themselves in a similar situation, you simply go to this resource hive, remove the queen, catch the removal and then return the queen back to the nuc. At worst she's out for 2-3 days. At best less than 1 day. And now you have some other options. With the queen out of the nuc, the bees will be making queen cells. You can cut them off, make up another nuc or put the frame in the new removal.
