Hey All,
Thought I would share my first cutout experience. A friend of a friend had bees living in their wall void and I agreed to remove them. After watching them for a while I was able to successfully guess where their comb was within the wall and decided with the home owner to access them externally. The interior walls were plaster and wood lathe :(. My cousin and I were the ones to do the cutout. We did the removal on friday the thirteenth and it went wonderfully. The bees were a joy to work with. Neither my cousin or I took a sting, and no bees were pinging our veils or buzzing us. In fact if I weren't a big sissy I would have done it without a suit :-D The bees had comb reaching about three and a half feet back into the floor joists void space. The only problem we had is not finding the queen. I realized that she could be anywhere in the house after I watched the bees for a while and realized there were a hundred different cracks for them to crawl through in the siding and interior walls of this old house. Needless to say after the removal I went back the second day vacumed about two-three pounds of bees that were clustered at the entrance of the wall void. (thanks to JP for showing off the leave a small piece of comb near the front of the hive trick) When I opened the catch box up I was hit with the scent of lemon grass oil :lol: Never did see her but pretty sure I got her since the bees were still joyously calm. I released them out at their new home in their very own hive. I ended up with four frames of brood and three 9x13 pans of honeycomb for my tummy :lol: :lol:
Thank you to Scott and Peg, JP, Shawee and Emil. Without your extremely informative videos I would never have tried this and it was a wonderfull experience.
I only have a few pics as our hands were full of honey and I didn't want to explain to my wife why I needed a new phone after the removal :-D
Exposing the hive:
Me with the vacum
Floor Joist void space with a cluster that we could not reach with the vacuum. Came back later and got them
The comb pattern. Just thought it was a cool pic of what used to be there.
Thanks for taking time to read!
Lee