Under the eaves

Posted by Jon on Jul 30, 2010 in Swarms & Nests | 2 comments

Another popular place for bees was the site for bee adventure no. 2 this week. A young family had bees under the eaves, close to their bedroom window. With one 3 year old running around in the garden below, and no. 2 on the way, they needed to shift the bees nest. They had rung several beekeepers who weren’t able to help and they didn’t want to kill the bees, so I got in contact and offered to visit with my beevac.

The bees had set up home in a cosy box formed behind the shuttering enclosing the roof timbers. As the timber had shrunk and the mastic had fallen out over the years, a crack had formed allowing the bees entry. The family thought the bees had been there for about 6 weeks so I was expecting a box of comb and a box of bees to take away after a couple of hours of beevac-ing.

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The bees were some 5m off the ground so a scaffolding tower had kindly been put up and secured in place before I arrived. With the family at a safe distance and all my equipment hauled to the top of the tower, I set about opening the box. As soon as I had a look inside it became clear that the nest had been there for a lot longer than 6 weeks – there were several feet of comb and kilos of honey not to mention thousands of worried bees!

Having got this far, there was nothing to do but hope I had enough storage space for the nest and start sucking up the bees off the comb. As it was a hot afternoon, the honey ran fast once the comb was cut so it wasn’t long before I was covered in honey and bees. My first beevac cassette was full of bees after about an hour and half so I switched to my reserve and had soon filled this too. The comb filled the box I had, so extra was put in an open bin liner (and I left the family with some to enjoy too).

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After a hot and slightly nerve-wracking 3½ hours on the tower, I had filled all my storage space so I had to leave the last small huddles of bees. I promised to go back and hoover them up if they became a problem when I’m next in the area.

This is by far the biggest cut out I have done and I learnt two key things:

1) Avoid sucking up honey with your beevac – it gunks it up!

2) Always take extra storage capacity with you – you never know when you may need it (and I was glad I had the second box with me!)

As soon as I got the bees home, we set about attaching the combs to the frames – a really messy job with this nest as the honey was going everywhere! Then the fun part, dropping more than 25,000 angry bees into the new hive.  I was expecting this to be a bit hair raising event but the bees were amazingly calm – disappearing into the frames rapidly. With the hive closed for the night, I went inside to clean up.

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In the morning, I put all the remaining honey (from the bags and boxes holding the comb) into a feeder for them – it was theirs after all. On with an additional super and an Asian hornet guard and the hive was ready to be opened. Immediately there was a gratifying whoosh as bees exited to explore their new surroundings, followed by a clump of workers dragging out the body of a wasp that must have been sucked up at the site. All good signs of a colony beginning to settle in. I won’t disturb them any more now for several weeks as long as there is plenty of activity in and out. My only concern is that the queen is healthy after the beevac and that will become evident in a few weeks, so fingers crossed, this colony has time to settle before the onset of winter.

My thanks go to Ann-Marie and Martin for being so relaxed as I attacked their roof!