I have been removing the supers to harvest the honey using an escape board to clear them of bees. Yet many bees stubbornly held onto the frames. I used my shop-vac as a blower to get the bees off. This worked pretty well, but still a few bees hung on and ended up in the garage.
There was one more super on #3 to remove. The bees were just not leaving even though I waited more than 24 hours, so this afternoon I removed it.
I had my suspicions as to why they were not escaping. I examined each frame, and sure enough, two of them had small patches of capped brood as well as some larvae. I carefully searched for the queen and, fortunately, she was not there. The two frames with some brood as well as three with unripe honey and five frames with drawn comb were put back onto #3.
I had 5 frames of capped honey and the bees were all over it. I got out the shop vac and attempted to blow them off. As soon as one frame was cleared and I moved to the next, the girls were back on the first. So I just blew off as many as I could and took the box into the garage. In the garage now is reminiscent of the shed a couple of days ago, although considerably fewer bees.
I will start extracting in the next few days.
In a couple of days, I will be able to check the nuc for a laying queen.
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