I've got them and I don't want them, so now I have to figure out how to get rid of as many of them as possible.
The big ones are pellet hogs so they won't be a lot of trouble to catch out.
It's their babies that are going to be the problem.

I'm thinking I'll start by building a couple scaled-down B traps. Use 1/4" mesh and make the opening say 1/2"x 2 1/2" and see how that does.
I catch a few every day in an unbaited torpedo trap, so I have to think the B trap will catch a lot more of them.

Seining is an option. I have a 4'x20' seine. Probably need one more along the lines of 6'x40' to be effective.

Fyke net would be best probably. If anyone knows where I could buy one made from 1/4" mesh I would love to have that info.

Draining/nuking is not an option. Adding LMB is not an option. 5lb flathead is not an option.
I know that I'll never be 100% rid of them. I just need to keep them under control.

If there's something I haven't thought of toss it out there.

I'm not sure of your pond goals, but is there a reason you don't want them? From my knowledge, you need predators to control BG so if adding LMB or larger catfish isn't an option, I'm not sure of any other option except for the one you mentioned: constant seining, trapping and catching.

Pond goals = YP, RES, SMB, HSB. No LMB, no catfish. The bluegill came from the hatchery last summer with the RES.

I put them in a cage to size them up for positive ID. Daughter's doberman that thinks it's a Lab knocked the cage over and some of them escaped.

They've been in the pond for 11 months. These two met the knife yesterday, and came out of the hot grease about five minutes ago.

Fish on the left is a BG and one on the right is a hybrid BG definitely not a RES. The place that sold you those fish is not reliable.

NEMO Fisheries in Perry, MO.

Probably 90% of what they sent were RES, but there was a handful of these mixed in. I expected that, and they were too small for my untrained eye to ID with certainty, so I caged them.

If daughter's dog hadn't knocked the cage over it wouldn't have been a problem. I'd have culled the BG/HBG and tossed em in the creek when they got big enough for me to tell them apart.

But now they're in there so I just have to deal with it best I can.

Augie, how big is the pond?

.35 surface acre

Keeping a trap in the pond and checking it most daily would be my first instinct, but I suspect that would be a forever means of trying to keep up. An effective seining would put a bigger dent in the population if you could tell them apart from the desirables. I would have trouble with that personally. I suppose caging the questionable ones until ID could be made would be an option...I'm making myself tired thinking about the time and work involved.

Maybe, you should just make friends with them??? Kinda like moles and possums at the country home...the sooner you name them, the sooner you can get on to other things. I have not made frineds with the armadillo...YET!

Let me know if you get into seining if you could use some help...I could use the experience as I have never done it. I can swim, however.

I don't think you can eliminate them, Augie, but in 1/3 of an acre angling, trapping, and possibly seining (with sorting desirable species back into the pond) should keep BG/BGxRES numbers low enough for you to enjoy your "YP, RES, SMB, HSB" fishery.

QA - You've been here, like your place my pond is in the yard, and thanks to the covid panic I get to work from home all the time now. Makes it really easy to check the trap three times a day. Adding a couple more traps to the equation won't be much trouble. Same deal with manning the cage. I built one that's 2' diameter and 5' tall. A cage that big will hold a lot of little sunfishes.

If it will stop raining long enough for me to move some dirt it will only take a weekend to get the forage pond built. I can pump from the creek to fill it up without having to wait on the next rain to do that. At that point I can sort what's in the cage and toss the BG/HBG into the bait pond. If it keeps raining and I don't get the forage pond built I'll eventually sort the cage and toss the ones I don't want into the creek.

If I wind up building or buying a big seine I will definitely be appreciative of some help manning it. Still scratching my head on that. I did some googling on Fykes nets yesterday. Those things are expensive, and all of them I found are made with mesh that's too big to catch the size fish that I'd be targeting. I'm thinking that the seine I have now might serve as a good lead connected to a properly sized B, Z, or cloverleaf trap.

TG - Yeah, I agree eliminating them will be impossible. I'm just going to have to do some extra work to control the numbers so they don't get out of hand. SMB and HSB go in this fall. I'll buy the biggest ones that are available when the time comes. I'd go so far as to hire a shock boat if it starts to look like I'm loosing the battle. And saying that just gave me an idea... I'd bet a guy who has a background in electronics (that be me) just might be able to build his own fish zapper gizmo. On a pond the size of this one it wouldn't be necessary to rig it on a boat. The electrodes could be deployed on PVC pontoons from the dock. Time for some more research...

I also have way too many BG as well as large LMB. I can’t get a BCP spawn off due to BG interference. I watched this happen with BCP and LMB. Anyone needing about a thousand BG come get.

I have a retired neighbor harvest about 60 eating size BG each year from my 1 acre pond. He caught his last 30 for the year yesterday. He will remove 10 LMB under 14 inches as well. Pond has some good size RES, but he releases them unless hooked to deeply. Seems to keep things pretty balanced for good size fish.

RAH - This pond wasn't supposed to have any BG at all. I've got my work cut out for me now.

I fished out another 8" HBG this evening. It's really hard to fish around the RES and YP right now. They have both been super aggressive for the past week.

I had enough 1/4" wire mesh to build a scaled-down B trap today. I tossed it in next to the dock a couple hours ago.

text it to me Greg, i'll post it for ya if needed.

You seen my fykes last fall.. they can build up a smaller version. A mini fyke. around 600 bucks for the 1/4" mesh.

You can manage a cool water species fishery with BG present, I do it myself, but it requires intense BG population management tactics. Through angling, seining, trapping and cast nets you can help manage the populations. Through these efforts [even through the ice] I now have multiple year classes of BG present, and actually grow some nice 10-11" BG - but it's been a lot of work...work I enjoy, but still...it's endless. Since you're managing a micro pond it will be far easier to manage than a larger BOW - so you also have that going for you.

Your smaller BG [1-3"] will serve as forage for your predators, you don't need to focus on management of BG that size, rather the issue is the 4"+ fish that are nearly invulnerable to predation in a limited gape predator fishery. If unmanaged the BG will stack in that 4-6" slot and overpopulate. Those are the fish you need to target in the seasons to come.

Mixing BG with RES is totally unacceptable for a professional hatchery - I'm sorry you had that experience. I personally would have demanded a refund, or they could have drained, seined, nuked and restocked my fishery.

I think that if I ever get BG in my yp/smb pond, then I will use lime to nuke it and start over, or I will just convert it to a BG/LMB pond and let it go. I only added 25 RES to this pond and I checked every one before putting them in.

I see someone else is fighting this fight, it’s not fun. We continue to trap them, and the grandkids continue to catch them on worms. We remove them all. Mine have crossed with the RES, and they are more challenging to to identify. I finally just let the son in law and my daughter put back any fish with an orange tab. I’m sure most if not all are still hybrids.
I put 250 HBG in myself back in sept of 2016. Also bought from NEMO hatchery, they’ve been nothing but trouble since introduced. We swam every day last weekend, and they nip the floating adults.
I’m not willing to drain and start over, and I won’t add LMB or CC. It’s just going to always be a battle. I usually comment/warn anyone looking at a SMB YP pond, to “NOT” consider adding HBG or BG.
I’m not that far from Boone County, let me know if you need help with a seine. I’m retired, so my schedule is fairly flexible. Good luck.

Thanks, SG. The mini-B trap worked great on it's maiden soak. Didn't put any bait in it. Had three bullfrog tadpoles and eight mixed-bag sunfish up to 3".
I put it in a bit deeper than I've been putting the torpedo trap. That one had two baby RES, four FHM, and half a dozen PK shrimp in it this morning.

I've gotta say the $20 I spent on PK from the ebay guy has turned out to be money well spent. I've caught way more of them than what I put in last summer.

Think I'm going to go ahead and sort the sunfish that I have caged now. I've seen enough of them over the past few weeks that I can pretty much tell a RES
from the rest. I believe that some of them are RES hybrids. For now I think anything that doesn't look 100% RES is going into the creek.

You might not want to mention putting them in the creek. That is probably illegal.

I misidentified some of my RES coming out of my forage pond. Some turned out to be RES/GSF and they mistakenly got put into my RES/SMB pond. So now I am catching and removing them from that pond because I wanted only RES in it (although I now have introduced a single male CNBG into that pond specifically to get a few CNBG/RES hybrids to up the catch rate).

Get them up to about 3" it is easy to tell the difference. For me it is tough in the under 2" size. That is where I made my mistakes, in the smaller fish.

Good point. I hadn't thought of that, but I'm sure you are correct.

Probably better to chop em up into itty bitty pieces and use them to feed the baby RES that go back into the cage.

Augie, do you have a seine? Some people on here use them very successfully but I haven't tried it myself.

Maybe you could refresh your RES genetics with an infusion of good stock from a reliable supplier?

I've got a 4'x20' seine. I'll attempt to enlist daughter's BF to help me drag it a few times this weekend.

Most of the pond is too deep to get through with a seine, but the BG probably aren't spending a lot of time out there right now. The males started fanning beds last week.

The mini-B is killing it!

Five hour, no bait soak - 1 bullfrog tadpole and 16 assorted sunfish.

Must be great "working from home"! You hiring? We could work from your home a couple days, then mine, then 3 day weekends!

Yeah, it is really nice. No wasted time driving back and forth to the orifice. I get up, start work at 6:30, unless I have a late afternoon conference call I'm done at 3:00.

I'll check with the boss and see if there are any vacant positions. Asking for three day weekends might be pushing it though. lol

I have not thought of this. Hmm. I’m sure my original RES were good fish. They were not from NEMO. I got them from Rex (Rainman). He put in 150 in April of 2015.
I have trouble telling the smaller RES/hybrids from pure RES. We also look at the gape along with the red tab. If it’s got a larger mouth, it doesn’t get back in the water.

Setter
I thought RES have a larger mouth than BG.....

Some of ours seem larger than others (mouth). I’ve just been thinking the larger ones were probably the hybrids. Hopefully I haven’t been removing the pure RES, and keeping the hybrids..

We catch quite a few, every day. From the original 150, we’ve had very good RES recruitment. Maybe they are all pure RES.