Friday, April 30, 2010

Bee Removal--Aubrey 4-29-2010

Our kids are spending the weekend with their grandparents, so hubby and I had the rare chance at a date night... so what did we do after dropping off the kids? Romantic candle light dinner? Theater? Dancing? Drinks? Go to bed early and enjoy a quite house? No, no, no, nope.
Here's a clue... check out my elegant attire for the evening...


How about driving 60 miles to eat some fast food and do another bee removal? Yep.

This hive was near Aubrey and had been there for about four years. The bees had made their home inside the siding of a wooden shop building.





As the sun set, we fired up the bee vac and started to catch as many of the bees as we could. This was our first time to do an extraction just my hubby and I.
Lucky for us, the siding pried off very easily to reveal the bees home.





This comb was built across the lenght of the wall joists as well, very pretty and new looking comb with gobs of bees.


At the bottom of the wall cavity was some older comb which had clearly broken off and fallen from above





Wait, who's that working the vacuum?



Yep, me! It was amazing to see the inside of the hive like that. The bees were hanging in sheets on the comb. I could have scooped them off by the bucketfull. I had no idea that there were so many bees involved when the guys did one of these removals. It was truly an amazing thing to see. There was a lot of brood and a lot of drone cells



The comb was stacked about three layers deep in the wall cavity



I kept feeling Curtis brush my back and legs and asked what he was doing. Turns out I was just covered in bees and I totally did not care.



This is not a great picture of me, but there is a bee on my bonnet right in front of my nose. I ended up getting stung once when I crushed a bee under my arm, it hurt pretty bad for just a few minutes and then I could not even point to where the sting was. Completely unlike a wasp sting (which make me cry for days)

The hive was located in one 16 inch section between the building joists; however we had to remove the adjoining two sections to catch all the bees.



All clean.




this is the back of my minivan on it's first bee removal. Packed full of sticky coolers and a giant box of buzzing bees.

Once we got home, we placed the new brood box and super then removed the bee vac components-- lots of bees!


Hubby did not seem as impressed as me, but this sees like the most bees we have seen yet.





We had to smoke them very heavily to try and get them to move down into the hive body.





These girls ended up with a brood box and super filled with bees. Due to all of the bees, we were not able to add back as much of the brood comb as we have for the other hives. I hope they will be okay.

Here is the cooler full of comb from our adventure in Aubrey



One other note... the homeowner mentioned seeing a swarm of bees in one of her trees a few years back. She said it was there for a day or two and then dissappeared... gee I wonder where it went?

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