Allen Dick wrote:
>
 The real trick is to use smoke to start the bees down.  Once they start
moving,
> the butyric anhydride will chase them a long way under the right conditions.
>
Hello all,
As a user of fume boards i agree with everything said. I would add a few
comments. When we arrive at the bee yard to pull supers we jump out a
survey the situation. IF we are pulling many supers with unsealed honey
we do not use smoke. Smoke causes the bees to gorge themselves with
honey from unsealed cells and much harder to drive down. With or without
smoke we ALLWAYS put our fume boards on crossways to let the bees exit
the super from above if they want. If you place the fume boards on
directly you get many times confused bees. Granted if done correctly the
smoke will mello and drive the bees down but they also bury heads in
open cells.
When bees are comming out the front your boards are working as intended.
The browns from Kansas(around 8,000 colonies)use a fume board with a 4
inch piece of pVC on the top. They turn the elbo in the direction of the
wind and say the process is really speeded up.The showed a tape of
their  super pulling at last falls Kansas Honey Producers meeting.
Looked easy to build.
My judge as to if to much Bee-go has been used is if the honey house
smells of bee-go over 24 hours later. I can allways smell the bee-go the
first day but not the second. We bring in unsealed honey also at times.
We run a commercial grade Amana dehumidifier. I check the sealed honey
and unsealed honey randomly for moisture content and when all are
correct we extract. About three days has been right in Missouri this
year but the second load I had to wait about seven days to get the
moisture correct. Less than 18.5% we consider correct although i have
drummed 19.5% for my own use and dropped the moisture by 1% through the
bottling process.
Sincerely,
Bob Harrison
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