We use a bee blower to clear the bees from the supers. If a honey flow is
on we first go through and tip up all the boxes we are going to take. The
blower is positioned behind the hive and the bees blown forward into the
air.( no need for fancy chutes etc -they find their way back into their
own hives quite nicely ). The box is then carried into the truck and
covered with a piece of plywood. We can usually get all but two or three
bees out of each box this way. After finishing the yard we move the truck
away about a half a mile and take off the covers. Most of the remaining
bees leave at this time. A load of 36 boxes comes into our extracting room
with about twenty bees which we vacuum off the windows.
 
If there is no honey flow on it is better to blow out each box as you
take it off the hive. The bees start to rob the tipped up boxes fairly
quickly and it is very difficult to blow the robbers out - they just fly
directly back in. They do leave later if you take the covers off and wait
about a half mile away.
 
We use queen excluders and find it simplifies this operation immensely.
You don't worry about blowing the queen away and you don't have brood in
the honey supers. The brood really attracts the bees and they will not
leave it voluntarily. Our results were much worse when we did not use
excluders - probably one or two hundred bees per load.
 
Donald Aitken
11710-129 Street
Edmonton Alberta Canada
T5M 0Y7