Beekeeping Tip: How to Make Swarm Lure
Фильм және анимация
Linda demonstrates how to make a swarm lure. This can be incredibly useful in early spring. Rub it on bait hives - old hives that are currently unoccupied - to invite bees looking for a new home to take up residence. Rub it around the opening in the inner cover. Rub it on the upper edge of the entrance - not on the lower part of the entrance - you don't want the bees to get their feet stuck in it. And rub some on two or three frame tops inside the hive. This works almost 100% of the time on old equipment. Using this, I have captured a swarm in old equipment at least once a year for the last ten or so years.
Recipe: one inch cube of beeswax (approximately 23 g of beeswax), 1/4 cup olive oil, 20 - 30 drops of lemongrass oil
In the Catching a Swarm playlist, there's a video of how to apply swarm lure to old equipment.
If you catch a swarm with this bait, post a comment here and let me know!
Пікірлер: 22
Hello Linda, I just found your channel. I like the ice cube tray idea, nice thank you very much. Blessed Days...
@lindatsbees
3 ай бұрын
Thanks for watching!
I just got a double boiler dedicated for beeswax recipes like this! Thank you ☺️
@lindatsbees
3 ай бұрын
That is awesome! Good for you!
Sorry that wasn’t clear 20-30 drops per recipe. Thanks for watching. Post here if you get free bees!
Thank you Linda.. greetings from Croatia !
@lindatsbees
2 ай бұрын
Thanks for watching! Welcome to you from your beautiful country
Wow! You’d just told us about it. I always learn something new from you.
@lindatsbees
3 ай бұрын
Glad it was helpful! A friend of mine and I gave a talk last night on how to catch a swarm. We gave a tube of swarm lure to each person in attendance. Hope they will catch swarms.
Great tips Linda
@lindatsbees
3 ай бұрын
Hope it works for you. Thanks for watching!
Great info. Get some free bees!
@lindatsbees
3 ай бұрын
And if it works and you get free bees, come back here and let me know. A swarm moved into my top bar hive the day I made the video and another empty hive is being explored right now in my yard.
@Swarmstead
3 ай бұрын
@@lindatsbees nice! It's a little too early here in Pennsylvania. But I've been catching free bees for years. Not with this exact lure yet. If I get around to making it this way, I'll check back.
If you use only one cube of beeswax and 1/4 cup of olive oil, do you add 30 drops of lemon grass oil or 10 drops? Thank you !!
@lindatsbees
3 ай бұрын
30 drops per recipe - so 1 cube of beeswax, 1/4 cup olive oil, 20 -30 drops of lemon grass oil. I sped up the video, but I shook 30X3 drops of lemongrass oil into my tripled recipe of the lure.
Thank you for the swarm lure recipe, i will give it a try, if you have a scale could you weigh your cube of beeswax in grams? That would make the recipe for everyone more precise because we have to guess the size and weight of your cube, thank you.
@lindatsbees
3 ай бұрын
The cubes are not precisely the same size. They each weigh approximately 23 grams. I weighed three of them. They weighed 22g, 23g, and 24g
@scottdc2105
3 ай бұрын
Thank you, that is very helpful@@lindatsbees
@lindatsbees
3 ай бұрын
I appreciated the suggestion. I bake bread all the time and weigh every ingredient so I should have thought of this. Thank you.
How do you use the lures?
@lindatsbees
3 ай бұрын
There's a video on the Catching a Swarm playlist that shows you how. You rub some around the hole in the inner cover, some on the tops of a few (2 or 3) frames in the hive and some on the upper edge of the hive entrance.