My first bee rescue, I hope I can get them through the winter.

[Sam Fugate]

Yesterday I was called to come and look at a problem a guy had with some honey bees. He had cut a tree and found that it was occcupied when he was cutting it into sections. I retrieved the section with the bees and got them home. I am going to leave the bees in the section of the tree until spring. My question is, Should I try and figure a way to feed them ? If so , what would be the best way to do so. The reason am asking is when I got to the site I saw several yellow jackets around the tree as well an thought that there may have been some robbing going on. I hope they survive, they were very calm and easy to work around.

I'll try and get some pics. posted later.

[rand]

Hi,

It will be alot easier for you to put them in a hive and see what is going there
from all aspects (family size, queen, diseases.... ).
For my opinion, they will have beter chance to survive this way.

After preperation, you can move them to a hive at night time
and put the hive in the same location and direction as the tree section.

Good Luck,
Randi, Israel

[Mr.Beeman]

They should be fine where they are until spring. If there is a way to reduce the entrance hole it would be easier to defend the hive.
Did you wait until dark to make sure the foragers were in before you moved them?

[Andrew Dewey]

I think it is late in the year for the bees to establish a new home - particularly if you will be using any foundation. Do the bees appear to need feeding? I'd protect the "hive"/tree whatever as best you can and as long as bees can still fly in your area, look at some sort of open feeding. Others will be able to provide you details on how to do that best.

[Michael Palmer]

Cut a slice from the top of the trunk. Just enough to expose a bit of comb. Then you can feed them what you will. Nail a piece of plywood to the top as a cover.

[rweakley]

I've posted this on here before, but here it is again. This is a way, come spring time to get them out of the log with the least amount of disruption to the overall workings of the colony and almost guaranteeing that you get to keep the queen(genetics) assuming they are worth keeping.

beetree.jpg

Do what michael suggests then in the spring, cut a hole in the plywood the size of the hole in the tree, screw it down and make that the only exit from the log, put a hive body on there with frames (with comb hopefully). Then place a lid on in such a manner as to give them a top entrance. The bees have to go up through the hivebody to get out and on the way back in they will probably start storing it in the frames instead of going all the way down into the log, the inside bees will eventually direct the queen up into the hivebody where the fresh nectar is. Once you see this you put a queen excluder between the hivebody and the plywood, wait 30 days everything in the log will have hatched (you may have a quite a few drones trapped down there) and moved up and you can remove the log and do with as you see fit.

[Sam Fugate]

Did you wait until dark to make sure the foragers were in before you moved them?

There was a light rain and it was a little cool. I suspect that most if not all the foragers were at home.