Blower

[mbc]

Stand the supers on their roofs for a few minutes before blowing and the beees let go easier

 

[BBG]

Hi there.

I also find this a funny thread to be honest.

I am a weekend beek and need to travel 30km to get to my apiaries. But apart from the few commercial beeks that really have no time to mess about because of the sheer amount of hives they have, most of us have less than 20 colonies if I am not mistaken.
Bee keeping is supposed to be relaxing. Take your time. It shouldn't be something that you limit to an hour a week during the season and that's it. If more things need to be done we just cram them in that hour....need to get back indoors quickly before "Home and Away" starts?
Why keep bees if you haven't got 5-10 mins. per hive per year to clear the supers manually?
You buy machines to save yourselves 3 hours of work with your bees per year?

Take a frame and hold it over the brood box and give the back of your holding hand a healthy knock with the other and most of the bees will drop from the frame and run off into the brood box. The few that are left can be brushed into the brood box with a winged feather.
All you need is a spare super to put the frames into. Simple. 20 seconds per frame - a super should be done in 3-4 mins.

Plus, a little bit of manual labour in bee keeping lets you appreciate your products more.

So what I am saying is - if your not a professional beek - don't bother with a blower!

Just my humble thoughts to that topic.

Greets
Phil

Yours must give up and lie on their backs after showing them the feather - ours keep coming back and refuse to budge - most are more than twenty seconds

 

[RoofTops]

You will often hear about "shaking bees off frames". For fairy sized frames like National supers it probably works quite well but for large frames, unless you get all the bees to wear Teflon soled slippers, it simply does not work. Try it on a full Dadant frame and if you can get even half the bees to fall off you are doing well. I use Dadant Shallow frames throughout my hives which are about the same mass as a National brood frame and I can't shake all the bees off no matter how hard I try.

A bee brush works well but as mentioned above some of the bees will fly back and settle on the comb. However, I used a bee brush for clearing supers for my first few seasons and would recommend it. It is also possible to make a box with two fixed bee brushes through which the super frame is drawn. My technique was to brush off as many bees as possible, putting the frames in a new super, and then go through them again outside just before extracting.

 

[flytrapman]

Could a bee vac be used to clear supers

 

[Flatters]

This is perhaps resurrecting an old thread, but I found it interesting as I tried a blower yesterday; It did not go well. I think it was a number of mistakes compounded.

The blower I used was a Wickes Wet or dry drum vacuum/blower. It is pretty powerful so I think it is strong enough. In retrospect I think perhaps it is too small a jet of air. A garden blower is probably as powerful but over a wider area at once.

My eldest son helped me and we took off the three supers. One needed more time so the other two popped them on the ground then put the other back on. I wanted to give the bees more space and move them up to a double brood box. Perhaps too late in the year for them to fill it out too much but we are in HB country and they have been bringing in shed loads and there are probably another 6 weeks to follow as well as ivy, so they should be OK. So we did the lifted the current BB and put the new one on the floor then the full BB, QE, super then CB and roof.

We then went to work blowing off the bees. I think we had left them too long and agitated the colony so much that they were not impressed and went super aggressive. The temperature was warm at 22 degrees but was cloudy and windy so that probably did not help.

We put the supers one by one on the side and blew the bees off as far as we could since they kept hiding. After the first blow we moved the super to 10 meters away and cleared the rest off.

We managed to do the job but I felt unhappy at the end. Too much manipulations done at the same time, too long between taking supers off, perhaps the jet of air was too narrow.

I have two more colonies that I would Like to do soon so any comments would be appreciated.

 

[VEG]

I use a clearer board then blow out the stragglers using a petrol blower works a treat, I angle the super and blower so they go up into the air and are not blown onto the ground or into anything. They just fly off back to the hive.

 

[beebreeder]

put a link up but it doesnt work sorry