How To Catch Swarms - The Easiest Way To Get Free Bees Using Bait Hives

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today we're going to be taking a look at how you capture a swarm using a bait hive. So over the course of the last 5 years, I've captured absolutely loads of swarms. I've captured huge swarms, prime swarms, tiny little swarms, I've been called out to bumblebees, wasps, you name it, I've been called out to it, and I just don't have the time anymore to be going out and capturing these swarms. So I have a number of people that I can call on now if I find a swarm or I get called and told about a swarm in a specific area. I'll direct it to one of the swarm catchers. Tend to be people who aren't that busy and they can kind of go out, react really, really quickly, and go and capture the swarms. That's good because it protects the public and kind of gives beekeepers a good name. They go and collect the swarm very, very quickly. And stop anyone getting injured. It's also a great thing for people to watch, so I love to be able to send people out and capture these swarms. The problem for me is that I just don't have the time to go and do it, so I'd love to go out and kind of catch all these swarms, especially the big ones. You sometimes find really, really nice bees, sometimes you find not very nice bees, but it's a really exciting thing to do, especially if you kind of see a swarm in the air, you see it cluster up, you might have a big group of people there and you can go and capture this swarm. It's cool. There's no getting away from that, but I just don't have the time to do it anymore. So going forward, I'm not catching any swarms, I promise. But what I am going to do is I'm going to set up a number of bait hives. Now, I've set up these bait hives all the time, like over the last kind of 5 years. I always have a few bait hives on the go, but this year I'm going to put a bit more effort into it and be a bit more strategic about where I'm putting them. So the idea behind a bait hive is that it is a hive With nothing in it that you can leave there and that you try and get bees to kind of move into. And I hear people giving the advice when they're kind of trying to start up beekeeping that they should just go and buy a hive and wait for the bees to move in. And if you're incredibly lucky, that may work, but the chances are if you buy like a brand new hive straight from the shop and you just put some wax frames in it and then just leave it in your garden, I think you'd be very, very, very lucky to attract a swarm. So what I'm going to do on this video is I'm kind of going to give you an idea as to what I'm planning to do for this season, how to put together a bait hive, what I'm going to be using for my bait hives, how to increase the success and the chances of attracting a swarm, and then I will update the video later in the season when hopefully we catch a few swarms in the bait boxes. So first thing to say is absolutely any container Would work as a bait hive. Don't think that you need to have a hive, it doesn't need to be kind of a hive, a National Hive, a Langstroth hive, or anything like that. Any container will work, but I found the best attractant to get a swarm is to use a hive or a container, or in my case this year, a nuc, that's been previously used to house bees. Now you want it the dirtier the better, and that's not to say it needs to be grimy and gunky, but it needs to be well used. So propolis is a good thing, remnants of wax is a good thing, old frames is the number one thing that you need to put in there to make sure that you're attracting these bees. I use an attractant which is lemongrass oil. Now lemongrass oil is an excellent attractant if you're just going to use kind of an empty box, maybe with some foundationless frames in it, and it definitely works. It definitely helps to attract the bees in, but I find that you don't necessarily need the lemongrass oil if you're using the old horrible black brood frames. So that's my strategy this forward, is that I'm going to use that. So this year, what am I going to do? How am I going to kind of attract these swarms into my bait hives? So I found that there's a few really, really kind of critical things that you need to keep in mind when you're setting up these bait hives. So the first one is the volume of the space that you're going to use. Now, there was a study done, not sure when it was done or who it was done by, so apologies, but it recommended roughly 40 litres of space was the optimum size for a swarm. Now, I don't like that generalisation, although we are all about no nonsense here at Black Mountain Honey. It's a very general statement, so I wouldn't kind of take too, too much notice on that. You might have a 40 litre box and you might have a swarm that thinks that's too small. You might have a 40-liter box and you might have a swarm that thinks that's too big, so don't get overly caught up on that. You want roughly 40 liters, there or thereabouts. If it's a bit bigger, a bit smaller, don't worry about it. The next thing that's incredibly important, and I think you will not catch a swarm if you don't take this piece of advice, the floor and the roof and all of the sides need to be solid. You cannot use any form of mesh in a bait hive. They don't work. The bees do not like any mesh, especially underneath them, and it needs to be warm and dry, so obviously no mesh on the top. It needs to be a completely solid box in all dimensions. So if you're going to use a hive, you need to block off any kind of open mesh floor because otherwise it will not work. So that's tip number 2. The other one is the size of the entrance. So when the scout bees are coming out and looking for these potential homes for the The swarms, it needs to be easily defendable, and that goes back to the fact they don't want the mesh underneath, but they also want an easily defendable entrance. So if you were to look at kind of where these bees naturally go in the wild, they might go into like a cavity of a tree. You can see it, and it's always like quite a small hole that opens up into a big cavity inside. So you want to try and replicate that. So what I do, and going forward you'll see later on in the video, I use my nucs. And I use a double nuc configuration, and I find that's a really, really good size, but also it gives you the correct entrance size for a bait hive. So that's the third one, you need to make sure that you get the correct entrance size. If you want a quick one to think, think about the size of a 50p piece, nothing bigger than that. If you want to go down a little bit smaller, that's fine as well, it will work, they might just be a little bit congested, but a size of a 50p piece is a kind of really, really good benchmark to use. The 4th piece of advice is get some old black frames, and this is the reason why I'm kind of pushing towards doing bait hives a lot more this year, is that I've got a lot of old black frames. And then you get some kind of unscrupulous beekeepers who get their black frames and they sell them off as nucs and then leave them to someone else to deal with. I don't do that. I try and kind of keep the nucs as clean as I possibly can. Do you know what I mean? There'll be varying stages in my nucs of kind of light and darkish. But I mean, when they're black and they're horrible and they're no good to anyone, not even good for kind of melting down, this is what I do with them. I stick them in a bait hive and I try and attract a swarm with them. So I'll give you a couple of examples of the, the old frames that I use. But don't, don't chuck out your old frames, don't give them away to beginners, um, and don't melt them down. Use them for your bait hives because I've found that is the number one way that you're, um, you're going to increase the chances of being able to attract a swarm into your bait hive. So you want really dark old frames. The next piece of advice, and this is kind of what I've been doing over the last couple of years, and it seems to work well, is you need to have a think about the configuration of frames within your bait hive. So just imagine an empty 40-litre box and you put a couple of drops of lemongrass oil in there. And you put it up and you try and attract a swarm. That will work, it might work, but if it does work, you're kind of in trouble because all they're going to do is you're going to have a box of bees drawing wild comb and you're kind of into cutout territory before you really even want to kind of get anywhere near that kind of place. So you need to think about how you're going to configure these frames, within the box. So if you're building them from scratch, I highly recommend putting some runners in there and trying to build it to match the frame sizes that you use within your hives. So if you're on nationals, try and build it that you can rest some national frames within your hives. Now a lot of people use foundationless frames, or they'll use little starter strips, and then they'll put maybe like 10 or 12 foundationless frames with some starter strips into a box, and then they use that as a bait hive, and that works really, really well. And what you're doing there is that when the bees come into the bait box, they can fly around, they can measure it, they can see that the volume is the correct volume for them, because you've not got the full sheets of foundation in there. And then when they start to draw comb, which is what swarms do better than kind of any other colony of bees, they've got somewhere to draw them, and they draw them out into the configuration that you want, which is, i.e., on a frame. So that works really, really well, and if you're starting this from scratch and you just can't get hold of any black horrible frames, that's what I'd recommend, is get some frames, wire them up, put a starter strip on, or put a kind of triangular piece of wood dipped in wax in there, and use that with some lemongrass oil, and that works really, really well. What you can't do though is you can't fill a box full of foundation. If you fill a box full of foundation, the bees flying in there, they can't tell how big that box is because when they get in there, they just keep on banging into the foundation. So you need to— if you can put maybe 1 or 2 sheets of foundation in on either side, but then the middle frames, they need to be foundationless so the bees can fly around and kind of get a bit of an idea as to how big that cavity is. That's what they're looking for. So that's something to avoid. Another piece of advice, I think we're up to 5 now, is height. Now this one's really, really important, and I didn't realize this until about 2 years after I started making bait hives, is that they really, really do kind of like a high position. And the reason is, is they're looking for— they're looking to kind of make a home somewhere that's easy defendable. So they don't want the mesh floor, they want a nice small entrance hole, and they want to be up high. You look at colonies in the wild They're never on the ground because the predators could kind of get in and cause issues that way, so they're high up in a tree. So please take all the correct precautions you possibly can, don't do anything dangerous, but get that bait hive made up and then just go and strap it to a tree somewhere. So that's what I'm going to be doing this year. I always advise you to kind of think carefully about where you're going to put these boxes, so The first thing for me is, why am I putting up bait boxes? And that is because I don't want to lose swarms from my own colonies, and that's the driver for me. I'm not putting them up there to catch wild colonies. If I catch a wild colony, great, I'll, uh, I'll see how they perform and then I'll maybe do something with them. I'm putting bait hives up to try and kind of catch any swarms that come from my hives that I might miss. So where do I put my bait boxes? I put them in my apiaries. One or two in the apiaries, and it's kind of a bit of a risk mitigation measure. You know I like risk mitigation. So they go up in the trees, and then I try and catch some swarms. If you are putting them in other places, so you are genuinely trying to kind of catch a wild swarm, you need to put them somewhere where you know there's bees. Now, pretty much anywhere in the UK, you're going to be safe with this. There's going to be wild colonies everywhere. So you don't need to think too much about that. But I'm coming at it from the point of view, please don't put them next to somebody else's apiary. It's really unprofessional. I'd be absolutely devastated if I found some kind of bait boxes like within close proximity to some of my hives. It's just not the done thing. So don't try and steal other people's bees, please. Much appreciated. So yeah, so that's about it. So I've kind of given you all my top tips. Just to kind of summarize them again, needs to be 40 liters-ish in terms of volume, needs to have a solid top, needs to be dry, needs to have no open mesh floor, so solid around all the dimensions, needs to have an entrance hole no bigger than a 50p piece. You want old black dark horrible comb in there. If you've got enough to fill the box with old black dark horrible comb, go for it. That doesn't matter. The kind of rule about them needing to fly around Pretty much goes out the window. If you can fill that box with comb, horrible black comb, go for it. That is what's going to attract the bees. It's that smell of an old hive. Lemongrass oil is an excellent attractant, so what I do is I use a little plastic baggie and I'll just kind of drop some in on a kitchen towel. I'll seal that up and I'll just pop that in the hive, and then that keeps it as fresh as it can be for as long as possible. And I think that's it. So I'm going to show you now the configuration that I use for that I'm going to use this year for my bait boxes, and it's a little bit unusual, but I'll talk you through why I'm going to use this specific configuration. So this is what I'm going to use for my bait boxes this year. It's a BS 2-in-1 poly nuc with an additional Maysmoor brood box on top, no feeder, and a roof. And I'm just going to use one single entrance on one side, and I'm going to block up the OMF floor So I'll zoom in and give you a bit of a close-up. Right, so as you can see, we've got, um, the 6x6 configuration. So that is 6 frames on top and 6 frames underneath. We've got a flat roof on top, and then we're going to block up the mesh feeder, and we're going to have a single entrance hole. So I will show you the configuration now. So we take off the roof, and you can see you've got your 6 frames there. Now these frames They're old manky frames. An important thing to say on the frames is there's no feed in them, so these have just gone a little bit mouldy. There's some water kind of in there, that will dry up. As you can see though, I mean, they're old frames, got a bit of mouse damage on this one. These are the frames that we're using, absolutely perfect for kind of catching swarms. So as you can see, the top box we've got 6 frames in. Take the top box off and we've got an empty box underneath. Now this is really important, and this is what I found is a really kind of good way of catching these swarms, is that you have the void underneath. So you're kind of putting together 2 strategies almost. You're saying, right, bees, we've got a nice empty void in here, but we've also got some lovely old black horrible frames that you can use To kind of come in and make home straight away. As you can see, this box is, is pretty filthy, so normally I would kind of take this box away and I would clean it, but no, that's not what you want to do for catching swarms. You want to leave it as dirty as you possibly can. This kind of mound of dead bees at the bottom, I'll clean out a little bit of that, but I'll just kind of pretty much scrape it out. One thing to notice is the mesh floor is still present there, so what I'll do is I'll block that up underneath just with some Correx or something. You just need to make sure that they cannot work out that there is a mesh floor there. So I'll just block it up. I'll put something either inside or outside, and then that will block it all up. The entrance, we're just going to use a single entrance. So like I said, going back to it, needs to be about the size of a 50p, but don't get too caught up on that. This works very, very well. Um, and that's it. So all I'm going to do I'm going to put that back together again. You've got your 6-frame BS honey nuc base with no frames in it at all, dirty as you can possibly get. Pre-used is preferable. If you can't get a pre-used one, you need to focus on getting the horrible black frames. You might want to paint it with a bit of propolis, but again, I mean, whether that works or not, we're not sure. And then you put on top your 6 frames Dark and as horrible as you can get. See this frame here, that's not too dark, but still it's, it's a good kind of frame. Key thing to say, there is no food in the frames. All you're going to do then is the bees are going to go in and rob it, and they're not going to kind of see it as a home, they're going to see it as a target for robbing. So you need to make sure that there's kind of no food in them, but as dark as you can possibly get them. Again, do you know what I mean? Nice horrible dark frame, loads of brace comb on the top, Bees will absolutely love that. And then again, we're not talking about any food whatsoever, so we don't want feeders on there. Take the feeder off, and then you want a nice solid lid. So then to keep that all together, I'll ratchet strap it up. I've got loads of these ratchet straps. Don't worry about the colour. Obviously, if you're doing it in a public place, do worry about the colour. Don't put a big orange one next to a road, people are going to see it's there. You want to keep these tucked out of the way. We're very tucked out of the way here, so we can use orange ones. So we keep that nice and strapped. And now we're going to go and find a place to put up this bait hive. So we're going to find a nice tree, easy access. Another thing I forgot to mention is ideally facing south. It's not the end of the world if you can't get it facing south, but it's Bees do like it facing south, so that's what I always go for, but it's not a big deal. High as you can possibly get, but please do be safe. And then you want to take another ratchet strap up there with you, and you want to ratchet it to the tree. So you've got a ratchet strap to keep the box together, stop anything blowing off, and then you want another ratchet strap to ratchet it up to the tree, and then it's not going anywhere at all. So we will get a ladder out, and we'll get up the tree, and we'll ratchet this in place. So I just want to give you a bit of a feel of how high we're looking Looking out for these trees, so we're just going to climb the ladder and I'll show you where the box is. Make sure I don't fall off the ladder while I'm doing it. So here we are, this is where the bait box is going to be. As you can see, we're quite high up, maybe 5 meters off the ground. That's all you need to do. You just need to kind of be out of the way of any predators, and that should give them a really, really good chance of finding it and then moving into it. So we'll get back down now and continue with the video. And there we go, it's as simple as that. So the bait hive will remain up in the tree until I either need that nuc box for something, or kind of June, July time. Like, there's not much work, there's not much point catching them kind of after June, July, um, because all of the good prime swarms will be gone. But I still, I'll leave it up there as long as I don't need it. There's nothing to kind of Nothing wrong with leaving that up there. What I would do is I would kind of regularly come and just check and see if anything's flying in, flying out of it. You'll see scout bees coming in, coming out, but once there's a colony in there, you'll definitely know. You'll see a huge amount of activity, so you can go back down and then retrieve it. The beauty of this system is that they're in— once you capture a swarm in there, all you need to do is go up there, close the entrance, they're completely sealed in, Remove the ratchet strap and bring the colony down. It's already in its home, and then you can just go and put that somewhere else. The only thing that you need to do is add the additional 6 frames underneath, because otherwise the bees will build down comb and extend those 6 frames at the top down further when they need to expand. But you've got a few days to be able to do that, so you need to kind of go around, do some regular checks, make sure that you're not leaving them up there. unmanaged because they will kind of build brace comb and build additional comb at the bottom of the frames. So that's it for today's video, really, really hope you enjoyed it. It's one of my favourite things, catching swarms, putting up bait hives. You get that sense of anticipation that the season's really, really starting and then you get the kind of nice fun enjoyment of going and checking them every week and seeing if you've got any kind of action in there. So I'll continue to do this on all of my apiaries, I'll have maybe 2 or 3 of these on each apiary I'll stick a couple of them at home, I'll stick a couple of them in friends' gardens. I'll probably do about 20 of them depending on how many kind of spare and surplus nucs that I've got. I'm not going to build any fresh ones this year. Did a few kind of plywood boxes previously and they deteriorated a little bit too quick for my liking, so I'm not going to build any more of those. I'm just going to stick with the colonies— sorry, with the boxes that I've already got, and we'll kind of make use of the horrible black dark comb that we've got. So that's it for today's video. Really, really hope you enjoyed it. Please hit the subscribe button. Please hit the bell so you get a notification for every video we upload, and I'll see you next time.