What does the smoke do? & Why is the queen trapped?

I have absolutely no idea how bee hives work but looks pretty interesting. Good job & good luck.

Both hives were gifts. But good ones are maybe £250 and cheap ones are maybe £150. You can get really cheap ones for less, but mine are both from the £250 bracket and made of Cedar, as a hard wood they should last decades. One of the hives, the one with the fancy sides is already 8 years old though.

Bees are around £200 for a hive's worth. But if you know what you're doing and you know the right people you can get them for a lot less or even free. Bees are essentially wild, so they do wild animal stuff and that includes just deciding to leave sometimes. Luckily not too often and you can apparently kind of tell when they're thinking about doing that.
EDIT: If you can find some that have moved out are a living wild and you can capture them, they're yours. Though I imagine there are protocols that bee keeping associations like to see followed.

All the equipment for dealing with bees and products of the hive, I've spent about £800 and had a lot of other stuff come my way as gifts.

I thought that the smoke in a smoker was special smoke designed to make bees do my bidding, but it's not. It's just regular smoke from whatever you've got that burns.
Smoke makes the bees head straight for the food stores in the hive and start pigging out. The reason for this is that they think fire is coming and that pretty soon they're going to have to clear out of here or die in a fire. So they gorge on food to prepare for the next few days which would be very difficult for them without a hive and to give them the strength to find a new place to live.

I suppose that means it's a pretty cruel trick to play on them.

The queen being trapped, well... I don't know the specifics of this as I'm not the one that trapped the queens, but I've been reading about why queens are trapped sometimes. The most likely reason I can find is that this queen is new and these bees did not come from this queen, so the breeder I got my bees from basically split one of his existing hives and put them in a box, the box I got them in, and put a trapped queen in the box. The trapped queen would, over time, sieze control of the bees in the box using weird bee pheromones, so now that queen is their queen. But if the queen was free, and the bees were free and both were alien to each other, they'd all just go and do whatever they want instead of bonding.

Then again, it might be something else entirely. I've been wrong pretty much with 80% of everything I've done so far in beekeeping, so it would be no surprise at all.

this sounds really hardcore

Oh I forgot the point of the smoke.

Yeah, you smoke them and they go gorging on food.
While they're doing that, you can enter the hive and basically do whatever you want. They typically shouldn't respond unless you're really clumsy.

The first night I put the bees from the travel boxes into the hives without smoke and it was a nightmare, despite not getting attacked, having the air thick with bees who are all very very very very very interested in you is extremely unnerving.

And last night I went into the hive to fix the sugar feeder that was drowning bees, but with smoke.
I think I saw a total of 2 bees in flight.
Smoke is the absolute pro bee nerf. Makes life so much easier.

Though frankly the way I read it, I'll know a bee attack when it comes. There will be no ambiguity.

really fucking hardcore. like 'The Sims: IRL bees expansion pack'

so its pretty much like playing dungeon keeper? if you do really well do you get to upgrade to wasps?

wasps are mean tho. bees are so friendly

How can you tell - do they start packing their shit up? (Not literally but I'm assuming they do something to this nature?)

watch for itty-bitty suitcases