One of our neighbors had a wild honey bee hive living in the walls of an old building. Turns out the bees had been living there for at least 25 years off and on. Which begs the question, how did the next group of bees know that the condo was empty and would be a good place to live?
The Gingerman and I went over with everything we thought we needed except two bins, one for honey and one for wax. The wax is old and dark but it is still wax and we were going to have to remove it anyways. I had to run back to the house and get those bins, we actually had everything else we needed. They are going to tear the building down so access was super easy, we could just pull the siding off a piece at a time.
The bees were surprisingly calm the entire time. We had empty frames so the Gingerman cut the comb out of the walls in sections and I rubber banded it into frames. We were able to get brood, honey and pollen all rubber banded into frames. I had 10 frames banded up and we inserted them into the bottom box. A large number of bees followed those frames into the box but it did not look like we had found the queen. As an FYI do not store rubber bands for any length of time, they degrade and break very easily. I broke about half the bands I attempted to use. The rest of the bag went into the trash when we were finished. Neither one of us are very good at spotting the queen but we figured maybe we got lucky and had moved her when we were scooping bees over into the box. We kept watching the bees hoping they would form a line of scent leading into the box. We even built a little ramp leading up to the box. At one point we had two groups on the wall but they kept hiding in the comb scraps we had left on the wall. So we just started removing every single piece of old comb by scraping it off the wall. We started at the top of the wall and worked our way down. As we got near the bottom we had two distinct groups of bees, one at the top of the wall and one down at the bottom. We scooped the upper bees into the box but never spotted the queen.
The Gingerman is totally out of all of his bee protective gear except for gloves and gauntlets. I opted to keep all of mine on. The Gingerman started to smoke the bees as they were trying to go under the building. He spotted the queen! I tried to reach over awkwardly with the queen clip but when I grabbed I pinched her so I had to quickly open the clip to prevent it from killing her. She flew off! We waited another 30 minutes and the bees started to form another ball of bees down near the bottom of the wall again. It was her, Gingerman spotted the queen again and we got her into a scoop of bees in the queen trap and put her in the top box hanging between some frames. We left the setup, as there was a queen excluder on the bottom of the first box to prevent her from leaving the box, until almost dark.
When we came back it was almost dark and there were no bees flying around. We had to shake the box a little bit to hear them buzzing around inside. We blocked off the entrance and strapped the hive together and put it in the back of the pickup. I had gone home and leveled some concrete blocks out in the barn lot so we had a place away from the other bees for this hive. I wired a couple of blocks to the hive stand so the wind could not blow the boxes over. I was able to just carry the hive boxes to their new location. I did strap the boxes down so the wind could not move them.
I did not get very much honey from the hive, most of it went back to the bees. I am trying to gravity extract it now for the person who let us collect the hive. I think I can get a single jar! It is very good. It may take me a couple of weeks to get it to ooze out of the comb with the help of gravity. I have some new metal mesh filters and they are very fine and the honey is very thick’s so it is going to take some time for it to ooze through. It may even have to warm up some outside. I could put it out on the front porch as long as I covered it so the other bees did not help themselves to it!
Stewart Creek Somethings 