Beemaster's International Beekeeping Forum
BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER => EQUIPMENT USAGE, EXPERIMENTATION, HIVE PLANS, CONSTRUCTION TIPS AND TOOLS => Topic started by: Jerrymac on March 20, 2005, 08:13:50 pm
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I talked to the guy with the bees in pump house wall yesterday and let him know that if he was ready I would get the bees out Sunday (today).
I went over there early this morning, oh about 9:30am. The bees were everywhere. He had already gone in there and started cutting the wall. But gave up because the bees got excited. I finished cutting the wall. And suited up before pulling it apart. As I did pull the wall out bees came pouring into the pump house. They flew around and grumbled a lot. Well guess what? I ended up taking out the whole four by eight panel that we had cut a hole in. The hive started from the very top of the wall and went down to within two feet of the floor. There were a lot of bees. I managed to save four frames of brood. Not complete frames, but there was a lot of brood.
Here is a picture moment that got away because I had no one there suited up to take the picture. This panel was the first piece he put in when redoing the walls. So the ceiling and west wall panels were butted up to this one. I cut the top as close to the ceiling as possible and pulled it from the side, folding it to the west wall. I scraped the comb off of the inside. As I was doing this the bees bunched up in the lower corner and a whole lot of them grouped up in the upper corner. After scraping the comb off I got the bottom loose and started pulling it out. When the top finally popped loose, all those bees rained down on me.
There was some honey in the hive. I gave a big chunck to the land owner. We got a couple of chuncks, and I gave a big chunck back to the bees. And there is some I am letting the first colony clean up.
Now I am waiting for it to get dark and I will go back to see if all the bees made it into the new home and bring it to the house.
And wouldn't you know it. This guys uncle has bees in his house walls up in Vernon Tx. That's close to Childress where I am probably going to be in a couple of weeks to get bees out of a church, a garage, and perhaps an old abandoned house. I might forget about getting the ones under the house in Brownfield. Or I might grab Brian and force him to go down there with me. I'm sure we could work something out.
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Boy..... you sure are staying busy with the hive collections. That's pretty cool. You'll have quite a few hives in no time at all.
Beth
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Sounds great Jerry, my friends bees where out today, we worked with them and his purple martin houses. He is teaching me so much that you would never hear about in a book. Bye :D
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I was afraid of this. I thought I might live too close to where I just got these bees. I went back awhile ago after dark and found a nice sized ball of bees in the pump house. I vaced them up and am wondering what to do. If I put them back into the hive they will probably end up over there again.
Perhaps I can place them over at Firetools place for a couple of weeks.
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As long as the queen stays in her new home, don't worry about it. These bees will all be dead in 5 or 6 weeks tops and the new bees replacing them will have no memory of the pump house. Now if this hive happens to swarm with this queen, you could find them all back there again. How many days has it been again Jerry?
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Just got them two days ago, Sunday. The owner of the place is a friendly guy but don't know much about bees. He was just worried they might attack some hogs if he go some and tried sharing a watering hole with bees.
Also he is not going to clean out the bee smell or plug up the holes. He said he would leave it and make a wall easier to remove so if bees do move in he will give me a call.
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And of course you told him, it's not if more bees move in, it's when more bees move in!! :D