My Bees... needed to go

If you had followed the hurricane Ian thread you saw "my bees" made it through the storm OK. Well, during clean up after the storm I was trimming trees and got a good look at the situation. The hive was mostly hidden by palm fronds and some Brazilian pepper tree branches. Most people in the building didn't even know they were there.

The bees had been there at least 4 or 5 years that I know of, maybe as long as 7 years. The queen may have come from a hive that was in my soffit about 40ft away. I had a new roof put on the building in '15 and I had some combs to clear out before the roofers could finish up.

So this is what I could see once the trees were trimmed.

People going to the laundry room have to walk under them and the dead tree is leaning on another palm, pushing it over toward the parking lot and into the fence. I couldn't leave them there any more.

I had made calls years ago to have them removed and the people I talked to wanted to charge me $500 and up, AND, they were just going to kill them. Not cool. I left them as long as I could but in the end I had to act.

I bought a cheap bee suit for $50 and some huge plastic bags. My plan was to bag the end of the tree and gas them with C25 from my welding tank.

I was telling a tenant my plans and she was as sad as I was about killing them. A few days ago she posted somewhere that we needed some bees removed with the key term being "Free". She said her messages lit up within a few minutes and had some guys coming out to get them the next day.

They show up and start working on the combs and bees they can collect. They strapped the combs to frames and started the process of creating their new home.

As they got deeper into the project they realized what they were in for. The top half of the tree is totally hollow and its full of combs and bees. They came back the next day to cut the top off and lower it down gently.

They dug through the trunk and found the queen and put her in a nice box to transport her.

As of yesterday evening they had a few boxes out to catch the stragglers.  The hive is set up on their farm with the queen in her new home.

So, the bees went to live on a nice farm with lots of other bees to play with. One of the guys estimated the number that came out of my tree at 100,000. I don't know if that is a lot for one hive but they were excited the whole time they were collecting them.

This is absolutely great news! I'm really happy to see this.

We had 2 "wild" hives that started to form up in our yard when I was a kid. My dad called a couple of people that sold honey in the classifieds.
One came out and set up at lunch, put the queen in a box and came back after work the next day and hauled them away.  

Couple years later same thing happened, dad called the same guy and out he came. Same thing.

The weird part to me is that they both settled within a few feet of each other, one on a branch of a tree. The other in the grass basically under the branch.

I'm glad their was a happy ending for the bees.

I was putting off gassing them as long as I could. I slowly gathered the stuff I needed at the apartments and was ready for the dark day.

My family has bee history. My great grandfather had bees and at 92 years old fell off a ladder trying to get a queen and swarm out of a tree to put in a box. He broke his hip and died of pneumonia in the hospital he practiced in for years.

My mom reminded me of this when I told her what I was going to do...

I'm not educated on this....

how hard is it to find the queen? 

Does it show up as obvious?  To me it looks like a challenge.

This is a nice thing to hear. 100000 honey bees! Wow!  Where I used to live you are lucky if you see one. They are aledgily are dying from some disease   (bug/mosquitoes killer sprayed in people's yards is doing it. IMO)

Now where I live now I am happy to see them flying flower to flower making honey. And seeing hive containers with honey at farms for sale.  It is a great thing that you didn't kill them off. :0)

Datsun310Guy said:

I'm not educated on this....

how hard is it to find the queen? 

Does it show up as obvious?  To me it looks like a challenge.

They are almost twice as big as a normal worker and have smaller wings. I think they have brighter coloring too. It took them about 20 minutes to find her in the tree.

Also glad the bees got re-hived.

In reply to Datsun310Guy :

Instagram video of queen bee among workers.  It kinda freaks me out when I see that lady removing bees without any gear, not even a head net.

Good on you for not taking the easy route but the righteous one.

mechanicalmeanderings said:

The weird part to me is that they both settled within a few feet of each other, one on a branch of a tree. The other in the grass basically under the branch.

I'm glad their was a happy ending for the bees.

All this is according to a bee guy that came out and looked at my place when the wife and I thought a swarm was settling in a windowsill here, so I might get this a bit wrong.

Apparently they all look for the same type of place, there isn't a swarm that likes roofs and one that likes trees, they all do the same thing, so thats one factor.  Bigger than that, they can smell old hives, so if they come near one they know that its a good place to check out.

So, you often get them swarming near where an old hive once lived

Cool. Glad they got a good home. 

In reply to jgrewe :

B+. 

In the past year and a half, I've had 4 different hives about that size on job sites. All were in trees destined to be taken down. 
 

Site guys are pretty excited to kill them, and seem to particularly like the idea of using a large blow torch. 
 

Not on my watch. All 4 were properly relocated by local bee keepers. (Who we're excited to get them!)

Glad you saved them , 

I saved one hive years ago but the other one was in the wall studs and the bee guy said he could to save them , 

looking back I probably should have called another bee guy for a 2nd opinion.

Good job saving them!!

Yes, nicely done. 

Thank you.