You've heard of Geek Squad right? Well, Paul Woodworth and I are the
Bee Squad of Northern Adams County. Why? Who knows why! Why do any of us keep bees? Let along go on bee calls. People call with their BEE issues and we spring into action. Today was a humdinger of a bee project. I'm going to try to explain what happened and show you the pictures.
Paul told me last week that he had an "interesting" bee call planned. He was not kidding. He said he could use an extra hand if I'd be able to go Monday morning. I said sure, I'll be ready to go. Usually this means my job is handing him the sugar water bottle and keeping the smoker lit. Not today my friends....not today. Today I was just as much in action as Paul.
Today, I could have used more hands. We may need to expand the Bee Squad for jobs like this one in the future. Yes, now that I think about it, two more hands would have been good....any takers? We'll get you a special suit. All white.
So we arrived on the scene and found an older home with some wooden slat siding on the porch of the north side of the house. There was some obvious rotten wood that provided a hole or opening for the bees to fly in and out of. The occupants were a really nice older couple who said they thought there were some bees living over there and that is why they called. They suspected that the bees moved in last year.
As we looked at the hole we saw the bees going down and not up in the hole. Which was a bit odd. Normally bees like to build up. But because of the windows, there was no room to build up. Just down. So Paul started pulling off the wooden siding. Then he needed a power saw. Then a crowbar, and a hammer. I was glad it was him in charge of Bee Squad and not me.
As we pulled the boards off, we could tell the bees had built comb all the way down the wall. So we'd have to pull all the board off the side of the porch. The owners did not care, they were planning to get new siding this summer.
See that rather small opening in the bottom corners of the two windows? That was the entrance hole. Doesn't look like an entrance to so many bees does it?
Smoke. Smoke....MORE smoke. The smoker generally calms the bees. Truthfully they smell smoke, think FIRE! Then eat up honey so their bellies protrude. Once the belly is full, they can't get their stingers out all the way...and it's better for us and for them. More bees live! SMOKE!
It was around this point that Paul asked if I had my smoker with me. I did not. He said, I think we could use two smokers. Huh.....a two smoker job.
"How do you want to do this?" I asked Paul. His plan was easy. "We'll take the brood first, then the honeycombs, then we'll put as many as we can in the hive box. Then we'll sweep a box full, then we'll vac up the left overs," he was rather calm.
Look at those combs. Huge combs. They had brood combs "On Top" or facing outward towards us. They had honey combs further back.
So up on the ladder with a comb knife and rubber gloves. He cut the brood combs first, and would hand them down to me.
I tied them to frames as best I could with those bulky crazy bee gloves. NO WAY was I taking them off. I'd just have to work slow. We tied up 5 brood frames and put them in the hive box.
Now we added 5 empty frames and popped a lid on top. It was loaded with bees already. Normally calls about bees, would be this. Some bees, a box and some sweat.
Then we had an entire wall of bees. Paul guessed 6 pounds of bees. I guessed 12 pounds of bees. It was a lot. More bees than I've seen on a bee call. We sprayed them down with sugar water so they couldn't fly well then bee brushed them into the bee box. We got about 75% of the wall of bees by doing this.
Now to the stubborn bees. We used the Paul Woodworth custom bee vacuum method. We started sucking up bees and it worked great. But I noticed we didn't seem to be getting the bees out of there. What the heck? The bees that were out foraging were coming back to deliver their pollen. Oh mercy. We're never going to get these bees. They just kept coming.
Finally we duct taped the vacuum to the hottest fly in place and let it sit. It constantly sucked in bees about 50 per minute. We sucked bees for at least 45 minutes. That's a lot of bees. I could not believe how many bees were just flying back to this house. It was a huge colony of bees.
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| LeAnn Vac'n LOVE it! |
I wanted to vac! So I got to vac while Paul cooled off. loved doing that. Watching them fly over the hose end and just WHOOSH right into the hose. They just kept going to their old entrance hole and they I'd suck em up!
The owners were very interested in the entire project. They had lots of questions. I think it's the bee humor effecting me, but when they asked if I knew what type of bees these were, I told them, "Well, there's Minnesota bees and Italians,' I couldn't make out their dialect for sure. They fell for it. Can't help it, it was fun.
They wanted to know what we'd do with the honey. It was all mixed in with brood comb. There was one good chunk of solid honeycomb so we put it on a board and shooed the bees away for them. Their grand kids were there watching as well so everyone got a good taste of fresh from the hive honey. It was very sweet and warm.
We thanked them and went on our way. We put the bees in a hive in my yard. I think secretly Paul is out of room for bees. That or his wife doesn't want him having more hives near their home so he let me keep them here. I'm happy, I'll take the bees!
It took two boxes to get them all in there. We put the hive box out, then the cardboard box dumped into that. We slapped an inner cover on fast as we could so they wouldn't fly. Then the second brood box, two frames of comb and dumped in the vac full of bees. It was at least 2 new package sized load of bees.
I'm going on record saying it was closer to 12 lbs of bees than 6!
