How do you lure wild bees home to keep them so they won't fly away?

Bees are best known for gathering flowers and making honey, and the honey they produce is a natural nutritional product. Truly pure natural wild honey sells very well on the market, so beekeeping has also become an effective way for many people to escape poverty and build wealth. The honey produced by wild bees that generally live in the countryside not only tastes better but also has stronger effects. So many beekeepers choose natural wild bees when selecting stock; wild bees are strong and vigorous and easy to keep. Then how do you lure wild bees home to keep them so they won't fly away?

I. Finding wild bee hives

1. Finding hives by the strong-lure method

When looking for wild bee hives, you can choose a place with higher terrain, then smear fresh honey on nearby branches. In addition, you can burn some old honeycomb at that place, so the smell of the honey and beeswax will spread quickly and attract a large number of wild bees. At this point you can follow the flight path of the wild bees to find the hive.

2. Finding hives by the tracking method

Within a certain period, wild bees follow fixed routes, so you can use the tracking method to find their hives. The best time to track wild bees is between nine and eleven in the morning when the weather is clear. But the distance tracked each time should not be too long; about 50 m per day is appropriate.

II. Methods of luring them home

1. To lure wild bees home, first make a hive box. The hive box can be made from a wooden barrel or a plastic bucket, and it must be well sealed; just leave one movable entrance hole. After the hive box is made, you need to make the lure. The lure can be made by boiling white sugar with honey. Smear the boiled syrup (or beeswax) on the inner wall of the hive box, open the entrance hole, and place it near the wild bees' nest or in a place where they often move about. Bees have an extremely sensitive sense of smell, and after about a few days they will actively enter the hive box; in this way the luring succeeds, but this is not truly luring the bees, and one more step is needed.

2. Bee barrel: use beeswax to smear the wooden barrel evenly, then place it near the lure hive box, light the old honeycomb again, and let the smell drift. After the bees smell it, they will enter the hive box. Be careful not to move the hive box, so as not to alarm the bees, otherwise the next luring will be harder. After the queen bee enters, you can close it up and take it home. The difficulty in luring wild bees home lies with the queen bee, so you must be patient.

III. Raising wild bees after luring them home

After the bees are lured back, they should be transferred into a hive for keeping in good time. Here it is recommended that you use a movable-frame hive for keeping them as much as possible; the advantages of movable-frame hives need not be described in detail, as anyone who has used them knows. After transferring them into the hive, feed them supplementarily once in good time. The feed can be syrup or honey water. If conditions allow, you can transfer in some brood combs from other colonies, which helps quickly stabilize the colony. Starting from the second day, use thin syrup or honey water for reward feeding every evening until the colony returns to normal development.