Something I built to recover swarms, it uses 8-frame boxes, so I can use my Flow hive brood box with it. Suction pressure is just about perfect, not too strong to the point that it will hurt the bees.
Bruce,
Awesome job n pix’s of that Bee Vac ! Just getting back into beekeeping after long time away. Not ready myself to venture into advances swarm retrieval yet. Did it a lot as a kids but usually in trees n bushes. Again great pix’s !
Fascinating, I am really looking forward to hearing how it works out for you. Please post more!
Dawn
Been a long time for me as well, but now that I’m retired because of health issues, I need a new hobby. At an apartment complex I stay at during the week, we get an average of 2 swarms a season and where they like to hide is difficult to get to without the use of a vacuum. Usually I’d call a beekeeper to recover them and they keep wondering why I don’t do it myself. My reply was as a kid the one job on the farm I hated the most was honey extraction and clean up. With the Flow Hive I decided to give it another go.
There was time a few years back when I could have done with just such a thing.
Jeff has a video of holding a brood frame over a swarm and they all marched on.
Mind you, you can only do that in your own apiary.
Do you know…I love that.
I shut myself in the sun room, put some music on, don my surgical scrubs and spend a hot sunny afternoon spinning the honey into buckets. Wonderful.The bees gave their lives for that honey…they deserve a little toil in return…just my feeling
We brought our home-built honey spinner with us all the way from the UK, so of course we had to have 230V power installed in the kitchen for honey extraction!
Fortunately, Langstroth medium frames just about squeeze into it (they are 2 inches longer than BS frames)!