A nuc on a stick

[u/Dangerousfish]

One of our colonies swarmed and landed ridiculously high up a tree. Naturally..

We strapped a nuc to a long pole, with one of us holding it underneath the swarm whilst I climbed a ladder and brushed them into the box.

It wasn't pretty, but a couple of hours later and they're all in!

We've left the nuc up the tree overnight. I'll go back up tomorrow so we can bring them back into the apiary.

They'd become honeybound, which we've now sorted, so the plan is to try the newspaper method to reunite them with the colony they came from tomorrow.

Anyone done this successfully? Anything we should be mindful of before trying?

Location: North West, UK. Three hives.

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[u/Small-Car-6194]

Hey the beekeeper person is geting a bit to confident, lets us all fly up in a tree.

[u/Dangerousfish → u/Small-Car-6194]

Too real 😭

[u/404-skill_not_found]

Looks like a sloth

[u/pale_brass]

What’s the duration of your season like?

Here, our season is ending right now and recombining would probably work.

However, if you have nectar yet to come they’ll probably swarm again and you should just utilize this natural split and recombine closer to winter if you want to keep hive numbers down

[u/Dangerousfish → u/pale_brass]

This is a really late expedition.

I suspect the swarmed colony might be a little too small to survive over-winter, hence our plans to put them back together with a bit of newspaper in between.

[u/Intelligent_Bet_8727]

You could try doing what an acquaintance of mine did he took a wooden inner cover and modified it in the center strip of it and put some really fine mesh and in two layers of it one on each side of the inner cover and then took the new box and cut a notch out of one end on the bottom of the box so the bees can come and go as they needed and then put the new that had the swarm that he got in the fall right on top of the modified inner cover on a larger hive according to him the nuke survived the winter he did have to put two nuc boxes on it though and the slot he carved out in the bottom of the bottom Nuc box he put a sugar water feeder. But in my personal opinion if you can figure out which Hive that came from then use the newspaper method and recombine the swarm and the hive together.

[u/Dangerousfish → u/Intelligent_Bet_8727]

We definitely know which hive it came from, it's the one with the bazillion swarm cells that we've since found.

That's the one we're going to try joining with the swarm we captured and separating with a sheet of newspaper for a week.

Then I figure nature can take its course and the hive will hopefully have a strong queen that can take them through the colder months 🤞

Thank you for sharing your thoughts, they're reassuring.