>>I needed some bees for mini nucs so I tried this. The bees blew the smoke back out of the entrance, no smoke ever came out of the top box, three deeps!

Bees make very efficient fans, don't they?

I am not sure how most commercial package makers do it but I heard of one in Canada who drums the bees up for packages.

For me, shaking the bees off of frames is the quickest and easiest.  It's best to find and put aside the queen prior to shaking!  By shaking I mean holding the frame by one corner over the nuc or a box with a funnel and hitting the frame's side with single, hard blow of the palm of your hand.  A couple of hits will dislodge most of the bees.  Surprisingly few get airborne.

I wish taking bees out of tree cavities was this easy.  I had one tree hole removal this season about 20 ft up in an oak tree.  The tree owners declined co-existing with the bees.  I had to enlarge the entrance with a sawzall to get my hand inside.  The combs had to be broken up inside to about 5" x 6-8" to bring out through the relatively small hole.

It was hard to collect the festooning bees with a vac hose directly (a blind operation).  I found it easier to insert my honey covered hand and gently grab one handful of bees at time to be vacuumed up outside.  It took a little while to get some 4 lbs of bees.  This was also a blind operation but at least fingers provide good feedback as they pass up the cavity walls scooping up bee festoons.  One can get surprisingly few stings in such an operation.  The chance of getting the queen is very small - that's the worst part of tree colony removals.

Waldemar


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