Honeybee Cutout

We had a great day yesterday doing a cutout.  A cutout is when a beekeeper removes a colony of bees which has made a home someplace they shouldn't be, such as the wall of a home, a shed, or, in this case, a garage.  Went went to the client's home earlier in the week and took a look to see what he had.

This is how it looked from the outside, a hole about ten feet up with bees going in and out.  See the patch underneath the hole?  That's the spot which got repaired when he had bees removed from the exact same place three years ago.  Yes, he had already had a colony of bees removed from his garage by another beekeeper.  Since bees love to move in to where other bees have already been, this was a great spot for them.  All they needed was for one of the knotholes in the cedar siding to fall out, which it obligingly did.






This is what it looked like on the inside.  There was a hole in the plaster, and the bees had formed a small cluster around the hole.  Looking at the bees going in and out on the outside, and the few hanging around inside, I determined that it was a fairly small colony.  The homeowner said they had first moved in about two moths ago, so we expected to find several bees, some brood, maybe some honey. 

We caught a real break on this cutout.  The garage had a twelve foot tall ceiling, and, of course, the bees were at the very top of the wall. It had been drywalled inside, but not taped and mudded.  The drywall had all been nailed in place except where the previous beekeeper had removed the colony and replaced the drywall.  This newer drywall was where the new colony was located, and it had been installed with drywall screws.   Right where the bees were was a square of new drywall. 

We set up a scaffold below the bees, then set a ladder on top of the scaffold to reach them.  Once I was up there, I removed the screws and tried to take out the whole square of drywall covering the bees, but the comb was attached to it, so I had to break it off in chunks to expose the comb.

The colony filled the space between the wall studs, and hung down below the lower edge of the open area.   It was attached at the top to the header, and in places to the outer wall of the garage.  I used a bee vac (yes, a shop vacuum modified to gently suck up the bees without harming them) to clear out enough that I could cut the comb loose from the enclosure.  I carefully pulled it out of the wall and handed it down to Ruth, who was on the floor below. 

The bees had made several sections of beautiful, straight comb.

Below is me holding a complete piece of comb just as it was taken from the wall.  It's over two feet long, filled with capped brood and covered with bees.  The more bees I could hand down on the comb, the fewer bees I would have to vacuum.

 

 Ruth took the large pieces of whole comb and cut them horizontally to fit into our frames.  She could get about two pieces into each frame.  Each piece of comb was secured into the frames with ruber bands.  This took some time, and I occasionally had to wait for her to finish a piece before I could cut out the next chunk and hand it down to her.

This shows the cavity once I had most of the comb removed.  This is the last full-width piece of comb, there were two narrower pieces behind this.  Once all the comb was gone, it was time to get the bees.  We got as many as we could on the comb, but many of the stayed behind, and most of them were inside the wall.  I vacuumed for a while, then had Ruth blow smoke from our smoker through the outside hole.  This drove many of them up to where I could reach them.  We repeated this process several times.  Eventually we got most of the bees, but there were still a lot of them flying about and some still inside the wall.

 Once we had most of the bees vacuumed up, we had to transfer them into the hive with the comb and the rest of the bees.  The best way to do this is to turn the bucket over, and bump it firmly on the hive, causing most of the bees to fall onto the top of the frames.  Of course, many of them start flying around when you do that, so you create a cloud of honeybees over your workspace.  But given a little time, they will settle down, land on the hive, and go down to join their sisters. 





This is a beekeepers hat when the beekeeper isn't keeping it on.


Once we had the comb hived and the bees cleaned up as best we could, we put a ratchet strap around the hive and took it out to Ruth's brother and sister-in-law's place.
We leveled a spot next to the hives we had put there earlier in the year, set some concrete blocks, and carried the hive to its new location.

 And here the ladies are in their new home.  We've given them some sugar syrup to feed on while they get used to their new surroundings.