Oh, ho ho. There's something I forgot from Friday
When Fledge and I were at the spring beekeeping convention we picked up some equipment, tools and things. One of the things we bought was a super soft bee brush, here being demonstrated by somebody who isn't me.
Here's the idea right, the bees wander around on their own yeah, but when you come to put queen excluder on top of brood box there might be bees there.
One of my hives has a wood / metal excluder like this
You can see the metal is stuck to one side of the wood frame, put it down metal up so that you don't trap any bees on the frame tops and squishkill them, simple yeah?
Yeah.
Anyway my other hive has this sort of plastic queen excluder
There is no safety lip on this sort, if there are bees on the frame tops, they get pressed. You are supposed to brush them away before placing this sort of excluder down, and once down give them a few moments they can allegedly get out from underneath it while it's pretty loose, but doubt it once you put a heavy honey super box on top.
So back to that brush. I've used it once before when I tried to remove a bee from spare frame that was being put away unused. All the bee did was put it's stinger in the air in response and sit there. So I flicked it away instead. Fledge has once used the brush on the piece of comb we extracted from the hive the previous week, you remember it from a previous post here.
She said it was useless and the bees don't get brushed away as it's too soft, but they will get caught up in it. But I was unconvinced, I figured she'd just done it too slowly or without defined purpose, so I got the brush and FAFFOOOOFFF take that you stupid bees, get off my frame tops.
Yeah.... about 10 got caught on the brush, the other 20 decided to register their disapproval at being brushed. So now I know what a bee sounds like as it lodges a complaint and Fledge knows what it feels like when they file that complaint in the butt.
She wasn't best pleased with me, but I have agreed to never use the brush again.