This is a post all about the trap out that we have attempted in north Horsham. So I was asked to come and have a look at a colony of bees that live in the wall of an old house in Horsham. The mission is ideally to move them to the back garden. Bees were coming out of an air vent about 4 m up the wall so it was quite a tricky process. Initially I suggested this was a job for pest control however we thought we would give it a go first. The idea was to divert the bees into a hive and see if they would use the hive entrance as theirs and thus move the colony willingly into the hive. If this didn’t work then we would go for a standard trap out with the hive close by. And if successful will need to find somewhere more than 3 miles away to house the bees for a month while we prepare the apiary in the back garden for the bees to return to. Otherwise they will just return to the roof space.
So the bees are a long way up and coming out of a vent. The original idea was to try and direct them to the ground with drain pipe and to get them coming and going through the hive but this was too far and would have resulted in a lot of angry bees. Turns out there is a second entrance to the hive just by the flat roof on the left.
So This is the set up. The bees can come and go through the vent via the hive that is set next to them. There is a chunk of honey comb and lots of old brood in the hive to give it a homely feeling. The white vent cover was finally attached to the wall using some roofing tape and some glue. I’ll give it a couple of weeks and see if the bees have moved. If not, then it will be on to Plan B. By closing the other vent we have forced the bees to explore along the pipe and into the hive. I also managed to put a few handfuls of bees in the pipe to help them to orientate them selves. the entrance to the hive is less than 3 Feet form the vent so they should also find it easily. Fingers crossed that the bees behave.
Update:
OK so this was all looking fairly good. We had to seal off the other two entrances but after that the bees were coming and going through the hive and seemed to be using the hive quite nicely. there were loads of bees in there so we moved it up a step.
So this is my new attachment. I have added a rhombus bee escape to a piece of ply wood and then attached this to the 68 mm tube that I use for the trap out. The bees can now leave the roof but not get back in. Any bee that leaves the roof space will go and live int he hive and hopefully over a few weeks all the others will join them. Unfortunately, we have had rubbish British weather since then so the bees have been inside hiding from the rain.
