Let’s see…lemongrass oil on a piece of paper towel, inside a ziplock plastic bag and old comb melted on a couple of top bars. All that’s left to do is to put on the top.
That one is done. Let’s check out the bait hive in the tree.
This one came through last week’s storm system with 70 mph gusts and a freak rare snowstorm of 4″. It passed the wind test. So we’ll give it some old comb and lemongrass oil as well. Is it 12 ft. off the ground. Hmmmm, no, but I’m somewhat allergic to ladders so hopefully six feet will be enough.
Adventures in Natural Beekeeping 
I never thought of using a whole hive for a bait hive.
My friend Steve has a Langstroth that he had not opened for 15 years. He says bees swarm once in a while.
It was getting funky at the seams so the bees used some of the gaps for entrances and propolized the rest.
We pried off the lid last spring. I’d never seen comb like that it was one big piece with little tunnels. We put a new Langstroth super on top —altered to use Top Bars. Hopefully the bees will build comb on it. I had planned to put comb in a bait hive but now it’s going into a complete Top Bar. (With some lemon grass).
Advice appreciated.
I was wondering if that blog would be confusing…the horizontal top bar hive I baited is from the hive that got attacked by wasps last year. Probably because it had a late swarm and went queen-less and couldn’t defend itself. I had a ground wasp nest about 50 feet away. We debated weather to kill the wasps or leave them…it was a tough call because you could see the wasps cannibalizing any bees that fell on the ground. 5 or 6 wasps would be ‘working’ on each bee. But what to do??? The wasp is native and the honey bee is not. Is it right to favor one species over another, and why? So against the advice of others, we let the carnage take place… it was too late in the year to requeen and we lost the
hive. I kept all the comb to bait more hives this year.