How to keep wild bees? Breeding methods and technical key points

Wild bees are simply wild honeybees that can produce high-quality honey, and the places where they produce honey are very remote, so many people like to catch some and take them home to keep. So how do you keep wild bees?

1. Make a beehive

First make a beehive. The beehive can be made from a wooden barrel or a plastic bucket. The beehive must be well sealed, and only one movable entrance hole needs to be left.

2. Look for a honeycomb

Go find some old honeycomb, then choose a wooden barrel, light the old honeycomb and put it into the wooden barrel to smoke and scorch it, but be careful not to set the wooden barrel on fire. Then smear the wooden barrel evenly with beeswax, place it near the trap hive, light the old honeycomb again, and let the smell drift around. After the bees smell the scent, they will enter the beehive. Be careful not to move the beehive, so as not to alarm the bees, otherwise it will be harder to lure them next time. After the queen bee enters, you can seal it and take it home. The difficult part of luring wild bees home lies with the queen bee, so you must be patient.

3. Later-stage feeding and management techniques

(1) Sufficient food: Bees, like other animals, need food. When food is insufficient, the colony will run away. Therefore, wild bees that have been caught must be fed in time. When feeding, honey can be diluted with water and fed to the colony, or white sugar can be added to water to make syrup for feeding. At this time, feeding the colony has two main benefits: first, it provides the colony with the necessary food supply; second, it can stimulate the colony to build comb and breed new bees.

(2) Suitable environment: Bees have extremely high requirements for the feeding environment. When the feeding environment is unsuitable, the colony will also run away. First, the temperature, humidity, and other conditions of the apiary must be suitable for the bees' survival; second, the beehive used to keep bees must have no peculiar smell (many colonies run away because of problems with the beehive); third, the environment around the apiary must be quiet (bees cannot be kept in a noisy environment); fourth, there must be few natural enemies near the apiary (hornets, ants, etc.).

(3) Install an escape-prevention strip: After wild colonies are caught, it is best to install an escape-prevention strip on the beehive entrance. The escape-prevention strip is made using the principle that the thorax thickness of the queen bee and worker bees is different. After the escape-prevention strip is installed on the beehive entrance, worker bees are basically unrestricted when entering and leaving the beehive, but the queen bee cannot come out of the beehive because her thorax is a little thicker than that of worker bees. In fact, as long as you find a way to keep the queen bee inside the beehive, the colony will basically not run away.

(4) Transfer in brood combs: Bees are actually insects that are very “attached to brood.” As long as there are brood combs in the colony, it will basically not run away. Therefore, based on this characteristic of bees, some brood combs can be transferred in to keep the colony. The specific method is to take some egg-and-larva combs from other colonies and put them into the newly caught colony. At the same time, give the newly caught colony reward feeding to stimulate the queen bee to lay eggs and encourage worker bees to nurse the larvae. As long as the queen bee starts laying eggs, the colony will basically not run away.