Warrior, can you give a few more details of the whole procedure? I understand the bee escape portion.. so you have a one way door letting them into the hive nuc or super or whatever that is. Does the nuc have frames with foundation etc? Are the bees totally trapped in the box or can they exit? Does the queen leave the brood and move into the box? Thanks..
The bait hive is a fully functional hive, free to come and go at will, though usually a small weak colony due to the immediate influx of new bees. Were it a large strong colony they could attempt to reject the new bees leading to fighting and loss. In this case I made up the bait colony by pulling frames from my other hives that could spare the eggs and brood. As posted it has three frames one of honey for food and one of sealed brood, bee larvae in the pupa stage that will hatch shortly to augment the small amount of adult bees that came with the frames. The most important though is the third frame which is eggs and young larvae. Note I made no mention of a queen being present in the bait hive because there is not.
Honeybee female fertility is determined by diet. All larvae are fed a diet of royal jelly for the first three days of it's life after that determines whether it will be a fertile laying queen or an infertile worker. Queens recieve an unlimited amount of royal jelly throughout their entire development. Workers are switched to a beebread (fermented pollen mixed with honey) diet from day three onward.
So by providing a frame with eggs I am allowing the bees to raise their own queen from eggs I have selected from one of my better colonies. One can always provide a queenright colony for the bait hive but a queenless one usually works better as you have better acceptance of the new bees plus you have a much less liklihood of swarming or overcrowding issues as it will take at least 18 days (before anyone says 21 the day count begins when laid) for a new queen to emerge and then up to another seven to fouteen for her to start laying.
The one absolute downside to a trapout vs a cutout is that the queen inside the wall will not exit and enter the bait hive. She is absolutely fixated upon her own combs and leaves for only two reasons, a reproductive swarm and an abscond abandonment. As stated her only option for leaving would be the abscond and she would not enter an already occupied hive. With a cutout one can often find the queen or she survives the ride through the vac.
Terminology;
Colony= the total of all the bees (one queen, several hundred drones and several thousand workers) plus all of their comb, larvae and stores. A fully functioning unit.
Hive= often interchangeable with colony but correctly hive is the box or structure that houses the colony.
Nuc= short for nucleus, first coined by Rev Lorenzo Langstroth to describe a small colony, ie., the core needed to start or establish a new colony. Can also refer to a small box or hive used to house this small colony, often a half sized box that holds five standard frames as opposed to the normal standard of ten.
Super= technically any box (open at the top and bottom) that is stacked to hold frames and comprise a hive or structure to hold a honeybee colony. Colloquially they are the boxes that are stacked on top or above the brood nest for the bees to store honey in. These can be of any size but the three standard sizes, as measured by height, are as follows shallow 4 3/4 medium or illinois 6 5/8 and deep 9 5/8 the western is in use in some areas and measures 7 5/8 and an obsolete standard jumbo measures 11 5/8
Foundation= sheets of proccessed beeswax imprinted with the base of the cells that comprise honeybee comb used to provide the bees a template of where to construct their comb. Purely an invention of the beekeeper as bees do not require a guide or template of any type.
Frames= wooden or plastic pieces that hold the beeswax comb. Originally nailed together strips of wood that held foundation but today can be entirely of one piece plastic comprising both frame and foundation or even completley drawn comb (Honey Super Cell or Permacomb)