Remember when I said that just a few weeks ago we were afraid we wouldn't be able to get any bees this year? Within a week-and-a-half we captured three swarms. Yesterday we went along on our first cut-out. What's a cut-out, you ask? A good question.
Bees didn't evolve to live in wooden boxes. Feral bees often make their homes in hollow trees, but any similar space will do for them. A hollow space in a house, such as an eave or wall space can function much like a hollow tree for them. Include a small opening for them to come and go, and...well, you may wind up with a bee colony in your home.
The downside of this is that once the bees build a hive in your home, they store honey which can attract many other pests as well. Simply poisoning the hive doesn't help, as the comb and honey remain in you house, attracting cockroaches and moths, not to mention the honey oozing down into your house as the comb degrades. The solution? A cut-out, in which the space is opened, and the bees and comb removed. That's what we did yesterday.
I've been looking at videos of cut-outs, and had been itching to do one myself. Mark, an acquaintance from the
Southern Illinois Beekeeping Association, called yesterday to ask for assistance on a cut-out. So I met him at a home on Lake of Egypt, Ruth joined us later, and we got to see first-hand the fascinating, if messy, business of removing a colony from a house.
First of all, the hive was at the top of the house, in the eaves right
up at the peak. Mark set up a couple ladders under the spot, then
suited up to begin exposing the hive.
Working from the tops of the ladders was the hardest part of this cut-out, at least from my perspective. The house is well built, and the sheet of plywood didn't come off easily. As he loosened it, a veritable hailstorm of mud-daubers nests rained down, along with an accumulation of dirt and debris which builds up in spaces such as this. But once he got the plywood sufficiently dislodged, he exposed the hive with its multiple rows of comb.
Interestingly enough, Mark had on his bee suit for the demolition part of the job. Once he had the hive exposed, he shed the suit and went the rest of the day with only a T-shirt and a ball cap for protection.
Here is the hive when he began. The procedure is to start at the outside, from the left, and remove each section of comb in as intact a piece as possible. These outer sections are the newest, and were filled with honey. My job was to go up the second ladder and hold the bucket. When Mark had pried loose a section of comb, he would deposit it in the bucket. As the bucket got full, we carried down and brought up another bucket for what we thought would be brood comb, i.e., comb with unhatched bee eggs in various stages of development.
Mark stopped from time to time to use a bee vac, a small shop vac attached to a bucket which could gently suck the bees out of the hive and out of his way. Once a section of comb was mostly cleared of bees, he could work that section loose, put it in the bucket, and repeat on the next piece of comb. Bit by bit he worked his way methodically down the rows, At each step he stopped, peering thoroughly at each section, poking through each clump of bees, trying to locate the queen. Only when he was sure he didn't have the queen in that particular piece of comb would it go into the bucket.
Back on the ground we had an empty beehive which I had brought with empty frames waiting to receive the colony. Before we started, we place a few rubber bands around each frame. When we brought the comb down, we used the rubber bands to secure the comb within each frame. The frames were then placed in the hive box, ready for the bee's use once they were relocated. Mind you, the comb still had lots of bees on it during this procedure. They didn't stand politely out of the way while he transferred their home to a wooden box. No, they crawled around on the comb, crawled around on our hands, buzzed around in the air. It is, to say the least, slightly unnerving for the inexperienced beekeeper.
We returned to the ladders to retrieve more comb. As Mark cut the comb, honey was released, and, gravity still being operative, it dripped down on me. So, too, did the bees. Finding myself increasingly covered with potentially stinging insects, I decided to a veil was in order, so I excused myself to put on my beekeepers veil and long goatskin gloves. Meanwhile, Mark was working in his shirtsleeves, occasionally stopping to ask me if the sting on his face still had a stinger in it. I'm happy to say that the sting right on his eyelid did not.
Ruth arrived later, and, knowing how much she wanted to be a part of this, I yielded my place on the ladder to her. Mark continued to vacuum bees and cut out comb. Once he had all the comb cut out, had scraped all the interior surfaces to remove as much wax as possible, and had sucked up all the stray bees he could, that part of the job was done.
We put much of the rest of the comb into frames, put the frames in the hive box, and filled the rest of the space with empty frames. The bees in the vacuum were shaken onto to box, whereupon they started to crawl down in among the frames. Sections of comb still thick with bees were laid on the top, and those bees began crawling down into the frames as well. Once most of the bees were in the box, we put on the covers (an inner cover and the top lid), and cleared away all the equipment. I tightened a strap around the hive to hold all the pieces together for the long trip home, and loaded it into the back of the truck. We had the hive, our equipment, our bee suits (now much dirtier - Ruth says that's the sign of a busy beekeeper), and a couple buckets with pieces of honeycomb.
A short side trip to Steak-and-Shake (it was after 9:00p and neither of us had had dinner), and then home. Our fourth hive of bees is thus sitting outside, and we are looking forward to seeing what the next step of this beekeeping adventure will be (bee?).
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