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I believe your trapout will go faster, and better, if you leave the cone funnel off for a couple of days. Add a frame that has some unsealed brood on it and in just a few minutes you will have a rush of nurse bees, house keepers, cleaners, fanners, the guard bees, and sometimes the queen.
Allowing the bees the freedom to come and go through the trap tends to settle them down. If you install the cone funnel at the beginning, you may very well get some very angry bees, and you will get bees trying to find a way back into the house, rather than accepting your trap as a horizontal chamber of their hive.
I like to remove 3 to 6 pounds of bees before installing the funnel. That helps to weaken the colony. If you want them all together, you can combine them later. Or, you can start colonies and sell them.
I would also blacken out the screen bottom board, or lay a piece of thin plywood on top of it. You don't want the bees to see a way to get back to the original entrance/exit. Trapped bees on screen are like bees on glass. They spend a lot of time trying to get through the screen and out to the light.
One more suggestion, move this thread to the Swarms and Trap Outs forum and you will get lots of advise (some good, some not so much), from people who are doing trap out now.
cchoganjr
Allowing the bees the freedom to come and go through the trap tends to settle them down. If you install the cone funnel at the beginning, you may very well get some very angry bees, and you will get bees trying to find a way back into the house, rather than accepting your trap as a horizontal chamber of their hive.
I like to remove 3 to 6 pounds of bees before installing the funnel. That helps to weaken the colony. If you want them all together, you can combine them later. Or, you can start colonies and sell them.
I would also blacken out the screen bottom board, or lay a piece of thin plywood on top of it. You don't want the bees to see a way to get back to the original entrance/exit. Trapped bees on screen are like bees on glass. They spend a lot of time trying to get through the screen and out to the light.
One more suggestion, move this thread to the Swarms and Trap Outs forum and you will get lots of advise (some good, some not so much), from people who are doing trap out now.
cchoganjr
