Waldemar

>>Place the new box above the old with a 'bridge'  so that the  bees
can walk uphill from one to the other.  Drum on  the lower box...

What percentage of bees actually come up?  And,  what's of greatest interest
to me, did the queen come up as  well?

Virtually all of them. Yes.

The movement of the bees, once they get the idea, is not dissimilar to a
swarm being hived in traditional manner.  Normally when driving bees the
original hive is inverted but I have used the technique when driving a colony  that
had built about 5 combs on a branch of a tree in the open air into a skep
without movng the combs.


Traditionally skep beekeepers would use a set of 'driving irons' which  came
in sets of 3.  One was a skewer to fix the two skeps together at one  point
(the bridge I mentioned in the earlier mail), the lower being the one
containing the colony inverted and supported in a bucket or similar (an upturned  3
legged milking stool would do as well).  The other two irons were shaped  like
the staples one uses for attaching pieces of paper.  The long centre  section
would be a short foot (Dave Cushman will tell you what this is in  metric) and
the prongs maybe a couple of inches.  They were used to support  the leading
edge of the upper skep and keep it separate by a decent distance  from the lower
like a yawning mouth.

Originally they would probably have been made by the local blacksmith in
exchange for a piece of honeycomb.  Nowadays using modern technology one  can
simply redesign a wire coat hanger or two.

As it happens, I spent today at our local College of Agriculture where  they
had an Apple Day and the beekeepers had a corner where we had a dislay on
pollination and an observation hive, candle rolling (a money spinner at 50 pence
a time) and a couple of skep makers.  One of the skep makers needed a break
so I took over from her for a while and then passed it on to a an artist  from
the stall next door who had been watching. The techniques are easy to learn
and it is a gentle therapeutic process of the sort that Trevor Weatherhead
would  appreciate while listening to a test match on the radio.

Chris

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