CATDOLL : CATDOLL: How to trap bees?

How to trap bees?

To trap wild bees, you need to choose a place where bees like to nest, place an attractant box, and let the wild bee colonies fly in. This should usually be done during the swarming season.

The trap box should be placed in a place with dense and lush forests, abundant nectar and pollen sources, and a good microclimate. The place should be easily discovered by scout bees. The trap box should be out of the way, clean, dry, and free of odor. It is better if there are traces of used wax inside the box, which is more attractive to bees. The trap box is best placed in a place with natural attachments on the rear-opening roller surface. The box body should be raised and pressed with stones to prevent wind, rain, and wild animals from overturning it, and a proper nest door should be left.

The trap box should be checked every 3 to 5 days, especially after a long rainy day when natural swarming is likely to occur, so the trap box should be checked in time. After wild bees enter the hive, you can close the nest door after the bees return to the nest in the evening, move them back for breeding or borrow combs to transfer to the hive.

The trapping beehives should be placed in areas with abundant honey and pollen sources.

Choose a cool and ventilated place. In winter, choose a place sheltered from the wind and facing the sun.

The beehive should be light-proof, clean, dry, and free of wood or other special smells, and it is best to have a beeswax scent.

Place the processed beehives in the selected place, making sure they will not be exposed to rain, and then wait for wild Chinese honey bees to move in.

Bees (Bee/Honey bee) belong to the order Hymenoptera, suborder Sphenopoda, order Apis, superfamily Apoidea, and family Apidae in insect taxonomy. They are an important group of the order Hymenoptera. According to fossil data, bees have been found in large numbers in the late Eocene strata of the Tertiary Period. Many species of the family Apidae have great economic value and are closely related to human life.

What is the technology for trapping wild Chinese honey bees?

The Chinese honey bee is an excellent bee species native to my country, also known as the Chinese bee, native bee, etc. It is distributed from the southeast coast to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. There are large numbers of wild Chinese honey bees hidden in the mountains and forests of various places. Capturing and improving their breeding is of great significance to the development of beekeeping. Let’s take a look at the wild Chinese honey bee trapping technology!

1. Habitat

The nesting locations of wild Chinese bees require abundant nectar sources, suitable microclimate, unobstructed flight routes, and the ability to avoid enemies. Therefore, they often live in burrows in south-facing foothills or hillsides surrounded by a certain source of nectar and pollen, where they can avoid the sun, wind and rain, and be warm in winter and cool in summer, and can avoid enemy invasions. Solitary rocks and single trees are their favorite nesting targets, so they often nest in tree holes, rock caves, earth holes or ancient tombs. The caves are required to be closed and dry, with appropriate internal space. The diameter of the entrance and exit is generally only about 20 mm, which is conducive to preventing enemy invasions.

2. Find the honeycomb

1. Honey collecting behavior: After collecting enough honey and pollen, the bees fly back to the nest at a low altitude of about 3 meters from the ground, which means the nest is not too far away. At this time, you can find the beehive by tracking the direction of flight. If the returning bees fly higher, more than six or seven meters from the ground, it means the nest is more than 1 kilometer away.

2. Defecation behavior: Bees usually excrete feces near the hive. You can carefully check whether there is bee feces on the leaves and weeds. If there is, there must be a hive nearby. The feces usually have one end that is large and the other end that is small. The large end points in the direction of the hive and the farthest is no more than 100 meters.

3. Water-collecting behavior: The bees that go out to collect water are old bees. They do not fly far, generally within 1 km from the nest. The water-collecting bees fly in circles when they descend and take off. If they are observed to fly in counterclockwise circles and fly away in clockwise circles, it means the nest is on the left, otherwise it is on the right.

3. Bringing bees into the hive

1. Use the smell of honey to attract bees into the hive: Apply some honey inside the old beehive and place it where wild bees often move. Check every evening to see if there are any bees entering. If so, move the beehive away. The moving distance must be more than three kilometers, otherwise the bees will return.

2. Use honeycomb fragments to attract bees into the hive: Find areas where wild bees are active in large numbers in advance, and light some honeycomb fragments near the beehives in the evening. When the wild bees smell the fragrance, they will come to the beehive. If the beehive also has the smell of bees living there, they will enter the hive.

3. Use scout bees to lure bees into the box: After finding the traces of scout bees, use some honey to lure the bees into the box, but do not close the nest door to let them leave on their own. After repeating this several times, the scout bees will bring a large number of bee colonies. After the bee colonies come, find the queen bee and imprison her in the queen cage and then take her home to raise.

4. Collecting bees from caves

1. Tree Hole: First, knock on the tree trunk with a stone or a stick to listen to the bee sounds, determine the location of the bee colony, and observe the entrance and exit of the bees on the tree trunk. If there are multiple holes, seal all of them with mud except for one hole at the top and bottom. Tie a cloth bag or hang a beehive on the upper hole, so that the bag opening or the box door is close to the upper hole, and then smoke or blow camphor oil into the lower hole to drive the bees away from the spleen and enter the cloth bag or beehive through the upper hole. Or use an axe or chisel to expand the hole, expose the bee colony, cut the spleen and collect the bees. When using this method, spray the bee colony with thin honey water to stabilize the bees and prevent them from escaping.

2. Mud hole: First, shovel away the weeds around the bee cave, then check how many entrances and exits the bees have. Except for leaving one main entrance, all other entrances are blocked with mud. Use a smoker to spray smoke into the hole at the remaining entrance, forcing the bee colony to leave the honeycomb and gather in the cave to form a bee group. Then use a shovel to slowly dig the mud hole from the outside to the inside to expose the honeycomb, and use a knife to cut off the honeycomb in turn, paying special attention to protecting the pupae and egg groups. If the queen bee takes off during the capture process, you can pause for a while and wait for the queen bee to fly back to the bee group before capturing.

3. Leak-proof rock caves: First observe the size of the cave entrance. If you can touch the bee mass by reaching into the cave, you can use the above two methods to capture it. If the cave entrance is very small and the rock wall is thick, keep a main entrance and exit and seal the rest. Then use cotton swab dipped in carbolic acid to plug the entrance of the cave and place it under the hive. Insert a glass tube into the cave entrance and the other end into the hive door. Put 2 to 3 honeycombs in the box in advance. The bees in the cave cannot tolerate the fumigation and will leave the combs and crawl into the beehive through the glass tube. After you see the queen bee crawl through and the bees in the cave have basically crawled out, you can move them back.

The nesting location of wild bees requires abundant nectar sources, suitable microclimate, unobstructed flight routes, and the ability to avoid enemies. Therefore, they often live in burrows in south-facing foothills or hillsides surrounded by certain nectar and pollen sources, where they can avoid the sun, wind and rain, and drought, and where they can be warm in winter and cool in summer, and can avoid enemy invasions. After the bees have collected enough nectar and pollen and fly back to the nest at a low altitude of about 3 meters from the ground, it indicates that the hive will not be too far away, and the beehive can be found by tracking along the flight direction.

1. Use honey to attract bees. 2. Use honeycomb fragments to attract bees at night. 3. Use honey to lure scout bees.

The first and most important technology is that it uses a special net to achieve an effect of rock orange. The second point is that they use a special cloth box to reach the highest point of the rough hail ball technology.