Fellow BEE-Lers
 
Following the excellent response on my question about white-backed bees, I have
another question about the same colony.
 
They had been left alone for a few weeks, building up stores rapidly (though of
course we didn't know this until we looked in the hive). The hive is a WBC, so
it has separate outer walls outside the brood box and supers. The bees had
basically built a very large amount of comb hanging from the roof of the outer
box (i.e. above the top super's cover board). In principle, because of the queen
excluder, this comb should only have contained honey. We took this roof off, and
using various bits of WBC box made a hive that, in principle, the bees on this
comb could leave but not re-enter - the idea being for them to take some of it
back into their "official" hive and store it in supers and that we could then
use the rest for cut-comb (it's beautiful stuff). However, nearly a week later
the bees showed no sign of leaving - if anything there are more of them in
there.
 
1. Is it possible that there is a queen in this colony, and that her presence
means they're not interested in leaving?
 
2. How do we get them to leave, so that we can get the honey?
 
Any thoughts on this would be much appreciated.
 
Leo
 
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