Trap for bees. Information for beginner beekeepers

2025 Author: Howard Calhoun | [email protected]. Last modified: 2025-01-24 13:10

To start an apiary is a business that requires financial costs. But a bee family can be obtained without investing. Beneficial insects are easy to catch. A bee trap, properly set up, can keep an escaped swarm or just free-flying bees.

The whole point is how to do it. After all, a bee trap must somehow attract those very little workers. This device is a small homemade hive.

New bee dwelling

Traps are different. It’s easier to create a house-like one. An ordinary bee trap has both side mounts and a tray. Such a hive is made of plywood in order to facilitate it. Experienced beekeepers suggest that making traps for bees requires ingenuity. This house should not be painted, let it keep its natural color.

But inside it should contain frames for bees, where the arrangement of a new home will begin. For this purpose, those that have already been used and contain honeycombs that have blackened with time are best suited. The smell of such frames attracts bee colonies. In the absence of such devices, you can use wax frames, apply propolis and mint. itit is done quite simply: the bee trap is wiped inside and out with propolis or mint leaves.

When installing the extreme frames to the wall, a gap is maintained approximately equal to the thickness of a finger. To do this, rails are fixed between the wall and the top of the fixture. When installing the rest of the frame, you also need to observe a certain distance, but the design as a whole should not be made heavier by such tricks. Therefore, so that the bees and the uterus do not suffer when moving the house, it is more reasonable to attach the frames to the walls of the trap using screws with their upper planks. And a canvas is laid on top of them in two layers, then a plywood or roofing material cover is placed and fixed with screws around the perimeter of the house. The trap is raised to a certain height and tied with a rope to a tree trunk.

Determining the location for the trap

Every business is carried out in a certain sequence. If this is an ordinary house, then before making a trap for bees, a place is chosen for its installation. Preference is usually given to a tree growing alone near the bee apiary. A meadow with blooming honey plants may be chosen.

Experienced beekeepers know that the range of each trap is limited to 2 kilometers. If you set several more traps inside the designated perimeter for one trap, then the bees will settle in only one of them.

The life of a bee family flows according to its own strict schedule. The swarming period usually lasts from June to July. Based on this rule, aftersetting the trap, you need to look closely at the tray so as not to miss the moment when activity appears. Noticing that the bees have flown into the hive, you should immediately close the tray and take the trap to your apiary. The framework in which the construction of honeycombs began, together with the family, is transferred to a full-fledged real hive. At the request of the beekeeper, the queen bee can be replaced with a more thoroughbred one.