Anyone ever use one of these or make one. Dont know if it would be much use but a bit of a fun project to make over the winter.
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Anyone ever use one of these or make one. Dont know if it would be much use but a bit of a fun project to make over the winter.
Never used one - but an interesting toy to make. I am not too bothered about keeping drones out for my own breeding. And to try to ensure that the flyers return home, I generally give the box bees are shaken into a few moments for them to return before tipping the bees into mini-nucs. (Some suggest give the box a kick to encourage the older ones into the air!).
However if you are thinking of putting bees into nucs or mini nucs in the same apiary; it is not uncommon for quite a few of them to return home and sometimes the whole lot go back leaving a frame of brood with no covering of bees at all - and your queencell has gone cold too. VERY frustrating!
The usual answer is to use the 3 mile rule and get the nucs well out of the way so the bees don't return. However this year I was surprised when I moved nucs just a few hundred metres; After keeping the bees in for 3 days, pretty well all the bees remained. This was a bit of a problem as I assumed that I would lose some of the bees back to the parent colonies so the mini-nucs I moved remained (over) stuffed with bees.