# Need Advice on Placement of Swarm Traps and



## AuntBee (Apr 26, 2011)

I am a second year beekeeper and am hoping to fill my two new hives with swarms. I am using 4 8-frame medium boxes for each hive, so I am using all 8 boxes for swarm traps. I am using top entrances. I have 3 questions.

1. I caught two swarms last year about a mile from home in a neighbor's yard. He will let me put traps there this year. Should I place the traps under the bush where the swarms landed or just place them nearby?

2. Should I already have entrance reducers in place in my traps to make the box more attractive to bees or will they move in anyway?

3. I have reducers ordered, but in the meantime, what can be used to serve the same purpose? Duct tape, maybe? I know I would have to do something to keep the bees from getting stuck to the inside of it.


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## SteveBee (Jul 15, 2010)

Aunt Bee....since you're top covers are custom-made, entrance reducers you order probably won't work. You just need some pieces of 1X lumber cut in strips the thickness of your top entrance. I have about 20 here. Make them an inch and a half shorter than the width of your entrance. Don't use tape.


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## SteveBee (Jul 15, 2010)

If you read Honeybee Democracy by Thomas Seely, you'll learn that the swarm scouts are mainly looking for two things: the right-size cavity and the right-size entrance. And the top entrance on your eight frame hive is a little bigger than what they're looking for.


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## SteveBee (Jul 15, 2010)

Have we met? I see we're both in the same town!


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## AuntBee (Apr 26, 2011)

SteveBee, you're full of BS! But I love you anyway!! :gh: (To anyone else reading this, SteveBee is my brother. BS is my nickname for him--Brother Steve)


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## odfrank (May 13, 2002)

>If you read Honeybee Democracy by Thomas Seely, you'll learn that the swarm scouts are mainly looking for two things: the right-size cavity and the _*right-size entrance.*_

I have already this year caught three bait swarms in ten frames hives with entrances wide open. I know of a tree cavity hive with a five inch wide by twelve inch tall triangular shaped entrance 12 inches above ground level with comb built all the way out to the front. It gets re-filled every time it dies out. I place almost no importance in the location of swarm traps and little in entrance size.


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## Intheswamp (Jul 5, 2011)

I'm not sure if you mean you're using top entrances for the hives in your beeyard or whether you're using them with your swarm traps. My understanding that one thing that swarms dislike is light coming into the cavity from the *top*. Seems, if that is true, that a bottom entrance for the traps would be better. ????

Ed


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## robherc (Mar 17, 2012)

Intheswamp said:


> My understanding that one thing that swarms dislike is light coming into the cavity from the *top*.


about a week & a half ago I removed a 2-3 week-old hive (from a swarm, of course...just that I didn't get asked to remove it 'till they'd taken up residence) from an old railroad tie that someone was using to landscape their flower garden. The bees had found a split about 0.5" wide and 1' long right in the top of the log, and a rotted-out cavity in the middle. The cavity was WAY too small (all the comb they'd stuffed in there would fit into 2 deep frames), the entrance, by comparison to cavity size, was HUGE, and directly on top...yet there they were. Sometimes, despite our best attempts at figuring them out, bees just do whatever they want! lol

Also, here's a pic of a hive that moved in 2 days after I did a cut-out, how you see them is exactly how I found them...the wall was still taken apart from the cut-out (I *told* the property owner to put roofing tar over the old comb attachments so it wouldn't attract swarms...) and they moved in 2' above the old hive, on the next cross-board, right out in the open! (talk about an entrance that's "too big") :lookout:


(click to view larger image)


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## ken rice (Apr 28, 2010)

Depending on what you did with the bees that you took out, That may bee the same colony that flew back.


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## robherc (Mar 17, 2012)

ken rice said:


> Depending on what you did with the bees that you took out, That may bee the same colony that flew back.


I'm pretty sure it wasn't...the property owner lives approx 35mi from my bee yard...that'd be one HECK of a "flight of the honeybee."


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## Specialkayme (Sep 4, 2005)

I don't think entrance reducers are _required_ on swarm trap hives, but I don't see how it would hurt. You are trying to give the bees the optimum hive for what they want. Seely did alot of research on what they consider optimum. My suggestion would be to use it to increase your odds.

But in the end the bees might not find the perfect hive. So they weigh a bunch of factors (cavity size, entrance size, presence of comb, smell of hive, direction the entrance is facing, distance from original hive . . .). Your hive that doesn't have an entrance reducer still might satisfy 5 out of 6 of those criteria, so they might move in anyway. Who knows.


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