Plain Talk: Queen and Drone Traps (236)

Episode 236 – Plain Talk: Queen and Drone Traps 

Jim Tew: Hey, listeners, it's Jim. Every week, most weeks, usually on Wednesday, I try to go to a local medical gym here and a young woman gives me my physical workout for the day, which is just about the most minimal workout that any one old man can be given. Every week, I have to come up with some new series of excuses on why I didn't work out on my own during the week, and I have to get the lecture, as I deserve. That one short workout per week is not going to be enough if I don't pitch in and do my part.

I thought, well, I've been walking. I walked while I was in Michigan. I was just in Michigan last week. I think I told you that in one of the podcasts, for my grandson's high school graduation. I walked every day. I walked six of the seven days. It was a pretty good walk. It was a meaningful walk for me, and I felt better, at least mentally, because of it. Off I do go for a walk, and having been gone for quite a while, I thought I'd add a walk through my bee yard as part of the overall walk. Of course, you know what happened. I opened the door, and there was this sound that if you've done this for long, you know that's a swarm. That's not just a healthy, eager beehive, but that's a swarm, and it's easy to pick out which one because it's the one that's just vomiting bees, and they're all roaring out. I want to talk to you about that. To say the least, my workout walk plans were changed. I want to talk to you about that.

[theme music]

Introduction: Welcome to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today podcast. Join Jim Tew, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honeybees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honeybees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honeybees.

Jim: Listeners, I don't want to say that there's a club, those who have experience and those who have less experience. For those of you who have experience, you know that there's a lot about beekeeping sounds and activities that just don't translate well into a PowerPoint program at a bee meeting. I'm watching these bees right now, and it's just impossible to take that view, even with a video, to a meeting and capture the same moment.

When I walked into my apiary, I'm not trying to be a cool beekeeper guy, but I really thought there's a swarm going somewhere. It's more, and the intensity is greater, than just an active bee colony. You can have a strong colony, a lot of flight, and then you can have a swarm which just has, not a roar, but it's just beekeeping turned all the way up volume. The bee activity, bee flight, turned all the way up volume.

It's easy to pick out the one. It was the one that was just, as I said before, was just ejecting bees like crazy. I didn't cut the grass while I was gone, so it's back to weedy again. There's just thousands of bees on the grass. As an aside, I'll jump ahead, there's still a lot of bees on the grass. No, this is not varroa collapse; this is something totally different.

I took out my camera on my phone, who doesn't do that? I was trying to videotape it for some future use, that this is a swarm issuing. Well, the light was wrong; I was shooting into the sun. It's going to have terrible sound, so I'll position myself better. I came around to what would be the westward side of the hive. It was in the sun. There were bees there, maybe 200, and they were just frantic. In an area about the size of both my hands, on the side of the hive, there were bees that were just frantic.

As you know, in your mind, when something like this is happening, your mind does more than one thing. While I was looking at that, one small part of my mind was saying, they're doing a breaking dance on the side of the colony. They are getting ready to leave; this swarm is going to go. Then another part of my brain said, well, you need to photograph that too, so I zeroed in on these bees doing what I thought was the shore loft dance, or the breaking dance.

When I finally steadied the camera and got a shot, and look, there she was, listeners. There was a queen right in the middle of that. Her rear end was turbocharged. She was just dashing and running and flitting everywhere. She was just a modicum of movement away from being airborne. You know that brain thing I just told you about? My brain right away thought, okay, you got to pick that queen up out of these 200 active bees. She's running like crazy. You're going to get one shot. Don't forget all the things that you've always told others. Don't crush her against the colony, don't squeeze her too hard, cup her in your hands.

Then my thought was to catch her and go straight to my man door in my barn that has a window in the door. Then I would open my hand against that window, so if I dropped her or lost her, she would fly to that window, and I could correct my mistake. Just as I was about to make my grab, a bee hit me in the nose. She didn't sting me. Just as that was about to be stung, I got her away. I got hit by a bee in the ear. She did give me a little sting. It wasn't a bad one. Then I had a bee hit me on my face. You need to know, listeners, there's just bees everywhere, swarming, flying, whatever.

Normally, those bees are not really defensive. As I hear myself tell the story, I wonder if the queen being right there with them was having something to do with it, or indeed if it was even the bees that were on the side of the hive coming for me. I really dragged this third of a second out. They threw my timing off. While I knocked the bee away from my nose and got the bee off my neck, and I didn't deal with the sting, in fact, it may still be in my ear, it was in my earlobe, it wasn't real painful, I made my grab at the queen. Having been mightily distracted up to this point, I picked up out of the mass, I got a bee, I got a queen, I got something. It was my single shot.

I ran to the shop door, and I got to tell you, it was disappointing. I opened my hand up to see if, by some miracle, I had the queen, and I didn't. I had just caught a worker, held her cupped in my hand, and take her over to the shop door and turned her loose. I practically ran back over here. I have no reason to exaggerate. I was really intrigued by this event today, so I have no reason to exaggerate; there was not a sign of a bee on the side of the box, and all apparent swarming behavior seemed to be over. In just that 40 seconds, the whole demeanor of the hive changed just to being a regular, actively flighty day.

I'm trying to be sure that I'm telling you as best I can, without any dramatic descriptions, that personality change was that fast. If I had walked out and seen the bees doing what they were doing now, I wouldn't have thought a thing about it. There is one thing: there are still bees left on the grass, and they seem to be young bees. Did these young bees plan to go on the swarm, and now they're outside without direction, without guidance, without instruction? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, how many bees do you want me to count? 9, 10, 11, 12, 13? Are these bees just lost?

Does anyone know anything about that kind of thing? When a swarm goes, young bees that have never really been outside the hive very much, if they pack up to go, and then the swarm doesn't issue, and the pheromonal word's not given, are they lost? I don't know. Secondly, the other thing that I was not sure of, if I had have caught the queen, what should I have done with her? Think about that while we hear from our sponsor.

Betterbee: Did Better Bee carries both Lyson pollen dryers and pollen cleaners? The Lyson 30-kilogram pollen dryer lets you dry up to 66 pounds of pollen per batch, perfect for serious beekeepers. Once your pollen is dry, use the Lyson pollen cleaner to remove fine debris and leave you with clean, golden granules ready for sale or storage. Some items are special order and may require extra lead time, so don't wait. Order early to make sure you get what you need. Visit betterbee.com or call 1-800-632-3379 to order your pollen handling equipment today.

Jim: Let's go back and make my story read perfectly. I made my stab. I was heroic. I was the beekeeper of the year. I grabbed that queen flawlessly and got to my shop door, and got her between my right thumb and forefinger. Well, I'll put her in a queen cage. Well, that's good, and then what are you going to do? I would put her back in the colony. I'm fairly comfortable telling you if I do that, they're going to swarm with a virgin queen. I think there'd be an excellent chance that this colony that's in a swarming state of mind now would swarm with a virgin queen, so at least I would have controlled the swarm.

What I would have liked to have done was to position the queen cage somewhere completely easy for me to hive it and then let the swarm in the air find the caged queen, and then cluster around it, and then may heroically show up with the bee box to put them in. None of that happened because I didn't get the queen. I hope that that dashy, flotty queen went back into the colony. I, don't you know, yes, don't you know, I'm still looking in the grass. All I'm seeing in the grass is these little forlorn, lonely, single worker bees that are doing nothing.

Now, there has to be another chapter to this. The chapter is that, in my mind, I had one of those old-style queen and drone traps. I went to the barn and I looked for that. What are the chances in my cluttery barn, me looking for a piece of equipment that I haven't seen in 10 years, what are the chances of me finding that thing? Did I even have one? As it worked out, yes, I did. I found it fairly readily. It's even got a stranger chapter. It's brand new. It's never been used, which is not surprising because most of these things were never used.

I never knew for sure if they even worked or not. I got a bee that's just absolutely determined to sting me somewhere around my nose. I'm trying to look into that queen and drone trap. Do you folks know how that thing worked? Was supposed to work. I don't know if I can describe it to you in a way that just wouldn't take up the rest of my time here. It's a cage that goes from the front of the hive, and it has two drone trap cones in it. When the drones come out or the queen comes out, she can't get through the excluder. They rummage around, rummage around. They find those two cone traps, and then they go up into a compartment that they can't get out of.

Then, in theory, you've got the queen trapped in this cage. Then I guess I'd have to ask Jim, me, now what are you going to do? You've got the queen in the cage. At least I would have stopped the swarm. I've got that gadget on there, and don't you know that there are about, I don't know, 200 of the most frustrated drones you've ever seen that now can't get back into the colony. I guess my plan is to put this thing on. It's got a valve and you can open it. I'm going to close it so the bees can't get out, should they want to. I don't know what I'm doing with this thing that goes around like that. I'm going to get stung right in the mouth.

I've got this drone, queen, and drone trap on. I took some time. I better go. Excuse me while I fight off a bee. I'm going to have to walk away here for a bit. She's this big. It's really taking it personally. I got to check my microphone. Everything's still working. We're still okay. I checked on the web and I can't find that that device is still for sale. If somebody can find them, let me know if I've missed something wrong and missed something on the line. In the old days, they were called a queen and drone trap. That's exactly what they trapped. They trapped queens, the occasional queen trying to swarm, and they trapped drones that were trying to leave the colony.

I've got that thing on. I don't know how it's going to work out. If with your permission and not having done this before, I'm going to take a break here. Got a little bit of time left. Not much. I got about four minutes. I'm going to come back tomorrow and give you a report on what this trap has done. Just so you know, I'm going to take it off later tonight and let the drones back in, but I want to leave it on until later enough that the swarm doesn't go today. Then I don't think it's going to be anything in it, but who knows? Stranger things have happened.

Here's the whole deal. I've never had a swarm like this happen before, where I found the queen outside the colony, running around. I've found queens outside the colony before, but they were lost because I had the colony open. I've never had one catch a queen right in the act of going. Let's talk more tomorrow, and I'll finish this up. Until tomorrow.

Jim: Listeners, I'm back. It's a day later. Yes, there's an update. Yes, it's a weird one. I came back maybe an hour later, and the trap had, I don't know, 50 or 60 drones trapped in the upper compartment of the trap. They were just frantic to get out. Of course they were. They're well fed and healthy and vibrant. They were just crazy to get out. My thought was if my queen was up in that mess, she would essentially be stampeded, probably to death by all these frantic drones to get out.

I released them all, put the trap back on this morning, and nothing's happening. That doesn't describe what happened yesterday afternoon when I was just casually walking back. It's probably 70 to 75 yards from my bee yard to my shop. Of course, there across the way is an old, forlorn apple tree. There was a three-pound, four-pound swarm hanging about 10 feet off the ground. At that point, listeners, I realized that we don't really know anything about our bees, do we?

I don't see how that swarm could have come from this trap, because even though I said I took it off, I didn't take it off until after I saw that swarm. Either the queen got by the trap, or number two, another one of my colonies, unbeknownst to me, swarmed. Number three, boy, I'm sorry about the wind. Number three, it wasn't my swarm. I know definitively in the past that I picked up some swarms that were not coming from my bees. As a beekeeper, I always wonder, where are they coming from? Since I'm numbering things, number two, does my empty equipment sitting around and my beehives sitting around, does that attract other swarms in the neighborhood to come by and check this place out? I don't know. I don't know the answers to any of that.

I've done this thing all my life, and I think I have more questions now than I had when I started all those years ago. I don't know where the swarm came from. I'll be 77 in July, and I know all the reasons for it, but I'm not going to let that swarm get away, so I got out an eight-foot ladder. I live by myself now, and I climbed pretty much up to not the very top rung, but up high enough, and I could get the box under it reasonably well, and I hived the swarm uneventfully. I didn't fall, and the bees stayed in the box. I'm feeding them right now and letting them calm down.

I've got an observation hive, three frames on three frames on three frames for a total of nine deep frames. I built the thing. It's a huge observation hive. I had it in my lab for years. I'm going to restock that, and you better know that I'll keep you informed on how that goes along, because that'll be an experience. The trap has really been interesting. Far as I can tell, it's not made anymore. It's the kind of thing that always sat around. Most beekeepers had one of these things, or two, but I never really saw them being used. Yesterday, for the first time in 50-plus years of beekeeping, I thought that I needed this device to try to capture this queen that was trying to swarm, but now I can't tell.

Can you think of any reason? Can any of you think of any reason why that queen would have been outside having this colony so upset, so rambunctious, other than them going to swarm? Now, some of you should ask me, have I opened it up and looked for swarm cells? No, that's not, that's just not me. With smokers and hive tools and heavy colonies. Just to tilt it back and see if there are swarm cells there. I should do that. I should do a lot of things, but I haven't done that. I don't know where the swarm came from, but I got a swarm out of the deal yesterday. It looks to me like this colony has not swarmed.

The trap is interesting to me. The bees seem to absolutely hate it. At this very minute, there are drones in the trap, but there's no queen up there. I would be shocked to death if there were a queen up there. It's not there. How does this segment end? It ends like this. I did get a swarm. Not sure where it came from. The trap did capture drones. It didn't capture queens. It's an interesting piece of equipment. It's on eBay and places like that for ridiculous amounts of money. If you think you've got to have one, while you can still get one anywhere, buy one of these gadgets used, but that's what it is. If it were still a highly coveted piece of equipment, you'd be able to buy it in Bee Magazine, so there's probably a real good reason why it's not available.

Before the wind blows me away, I'm going to tell you bye for this week. I'll be anxious to talk to you again next week. You should always know, I deeply appreciate you listening to me sitting here just talking with my bees and talking with you. Bye-bye.

[theme music]

[00:24:06] [END OF AUDIO]