Although a bit windy today, I transferred the bees in the Octagonal Bait hive and the papercrete bait hive that had attracted two of my swarms/casts. I didn't want to leave it any longer as I knew they would be building comb pretty fast and the if left for much longer the comb shape would have been all wrong and I would have had to resort to trimming the combs. I transferred the octagonal one first as this one had odd shaped top bars that were only about a cm thick. I took the same number of standard top bars and screwed through directly over these thinner bars and simply lifted them out and directly into the kenyan in the same order. So these combs are a bit odd as they have an extra underslung section.
I then tackled the papercrete hive. This was the last one to attract a secondary swarm so I knew its comb would be smaller. I lifted these bars out and into the smaller catenary hive. Again these bees were quite mild and in my 1-10 temperament league, I would give the octagonal bees a 2 and the papercrete a 3. I put queen includers on the entrances just to make certain they don't decamp, perhaps not liking the new wood smells. They soon settled down and are now back to normal. The photo shows the kenyan with the octagonal minus roof and behind the Catenary hive with the papercrete box on it's side. These hives are not in the apiary, I set my bait hives by the side of my garage about 100m away from the apiary. It will be some time before I can move them 1m at a time to their final positions.
I have one more transfer to do, the kenyan nuc to full size kenyan then my Spanish season is complete. Thankfully that one is in the apiary.
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