Hi Steve/all

Steve, you mentioned you have a swarm and want to give it back to its
daughter hive (I call the original hive the daughter hive, as the old
queen usualy goes with the swarm!)

This is easy - you have them in a cardboard box. Tape the box up and
poke holes in it's lid with a pen. Before you tape the box up (I am
assuming thiss is a photocopier paper box) put a frame of uncapped
nectar into the box. Put a queen excluder over the old hive, put the
box on the excluder and put a brood body around it. The box just fits
into a brood box, then put a lid on it.

It takes the bees about a day to chew in and out of the box. You will
lose maybe a hundred bees AND THE OLD QUEEN to fighting, as the bees
get out and go down into the brood box. The old queen cannot get
through the excluder, so when you take the excluder of the next day
and put it a distance from the hive the queen will be in there.

I use this method if I have the time, otherwise I just take the queen
out and dump the swarm in any hive. One never loses more than 5% of
the swarm.

Another method, but this may be capensis specific, is to take the
queen out of the swarm. Then close it up, and at night dump the swarm
in front of the target hive very quietly. If you don't disturb the
bees in the target hive they dont sound an alarm and the new swarm
integrates peacefully.

Keep well

Garth

Keep well

Garth

Garth Cambray           Camdini Apiaries
15 Park Road
Grahamstown             Apis mellifera capensis
6139 South Africa

Time = Honey