Bee/wasp Trap
We have a hive of bees that have decided to nest under our front steps. It's a liability for them to stay there so I decided to take some action. First I tried the more traditional treatment of spraying the nest. Although I did kill some of them, it didn't effect most of the hive. Tried a different brand with even poorer results. And then I remembered seeing a post on Hackaday about catching wasps and I had to try it. Here is Matthias Wandel's version. His trap is much more powerful and more refined then mine.
Everything I used for this project was sitting in my garage before I started. I took a peice of glass and screen from an old screen door. I built a box and put the glass on top and the screen slanted across the middle to work as a filter. I caulked around the screen make sure no bees could crawl around it. Then I screwed a peice of wood to the back and cut a couple of holes for the hoses.
I hooked a mini shop vac to the exhaust hole, and a long peice of pvc pipe to the intake. A word of caution, due to the smooth inside of the pvc there is very little friction and the bees enter the box at quite a high speed. If you are trying to be humane and are not trying to kill the insect, you should find a way to slow down the entry, or at least pad the wall with foam. As it is now half of the bees die by smashing into the side of the box, the other half are removed from the hive population permanently...
All that was left was to tape up all the sides and cracks with aluminum duct tape and lay the pvc next to the hive entrance. I also put a couple of bricks around the shopvac to keep it from shifting or falling over. If you expand the top picture you can see the black spots inside, each spot is 2-5 bees. After 4 hours I had 52 bees, I would have left it running but I didn't want to drive my neighbors crazy with the sound of a shopvac all night. Acording to my Kill A Watt, in those 4 hours it used 2.52 kilowatt hours of electricity. That is a whole lot cheaper then pesticides.
Go there... http://techyguru.net/beeremover.html
Don
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