Help- swarm in lined chimney!

[beekake]

I'm a new beekeeper...last week, I found sealed queen cells in my hive. I removed all but one. One of the cells I removed had a hinged cap...so two queens. Today, a swarm left the colony and found its way to the chimney of the house at the apiary site.

The chimney belongs to an 18th C Queen Anne farmhouse, it is lined (wood burner), and the bees have got into the chimney space between the outer brick and the flue liner. They got in to the space through an air-brick in the outer wall of the chimney.

To try and encourage the bees out, we put smoke up between the flue liner and the outer wall (difficult! and hard on the lungs). This got a mass of bees out of the airbrick and onto the outside of the chimney again, but they were not in a mood to fly off and there was still plenty of buzzing coming from inside the chimney. We lit the woodburner to try and 'warm them out', and with the combination of smoke and heat, we did quite well, but not good enough.

The chimney is high, and difficult to access. We managed to get some bees down using a water jet from a hose (they were obviously dead afterwards), but they seem in no mood to leave their new found home.

Anyone have any advice for getting them out?

Beekake

PS I've left a brood box with frames and a feeder full of syrup next to the house, about 30 yds as the bee flies from where the swarm is right now.

PPS yes, this is probably the cast swarm that Plumberman and several others warned me of yesterday... the hive they came from is still buzzing with bees about.

 

[dudley]

I have taken several swarms, even established colonies from chimneys now. It’s really hard and every situation has its own challenges, access for one!
The way that has worked for me with a lined chimney, is getting good access to the chimney right at the top, this may mean scaffold.
You could then do a trap out but I have adapted a vacuum cleaner as an extractor. The suck hose 1st goes into a ply box which has a mesh screen dividing the inside into two parts. Another hose then goes from the other side of the box into the vacuum.
I then put the vacuum nozzle down between the liner and the brick chimney and simple suck up the bees. The mesh holds the bees back in the ply box and stops them going into the vacuum itself.
Both times I got the bees out but once I must have killed the queen, however I was still able to combine the saved bees with another colony a few weeks later.

But I doubt they will stay in that confined space, esp with an active chimney. The established collonies I have taken from chimneys have all been redundant flues, with bees actually in the centre of chimney under the top pot. Only the new swarms were in between liner and brick.

 

[beekake]

Thanks. I'm going to try one more time with smoke today. I'm hoping to get there when the weather is a bit warmer so the bees might be a bit more willing to come out and fly off. Failing that, it's going to be a scaffold job but the height and location make this a bit of a challenge!

This is not how I wanted my first experiences as a beekeeper to be!