We did another trap-out, this time in North Maleny not far from the River School.

I always seem to underestimate the amount of time these jobs will take so luckily it’s not too far from home. The most time consuming part of the job is inevitably making sure all other possible entry and exit points of the hive are blocked leaving just one for the trap-out cone. If there is just one other entry, the bees will find it and bypass the cone and the trap-out will fail.

After drilling some inspection holes, this hive turned out to be much larger than anticipated, occupying at least 2 metres of the tree hollow. My initial plan was to try a forced abscond removal but I think this hive is just too big and well established so this job will carry on over the next few weeks.

Usually with trap-outs we add a frame of brood and eggs to the catch box to encourage the trapped out bees into their new home. In this case I instead used a small 2 frame nuc colony including the queen. This colony had been struggling over winter so I figured I had nothing to loose if the trapped-out bees didn’t accept the queen but an inspection a day later revealed that the queen was still in the box unharmed going about her day and hopefully excited about the massive boost to her work force.