Probably the COOLEST Project We've Ever Done!

Probably the COOLEST Project We've Ever Done!

Those of you who have been around us or talked to us in the past month are probably tired of hearing about bees. But when you have to remove a hive that's been in your house on and off for the past 40 years BY YOURSELVES (thanks COVID19) with no experience, well, you tend to obsess. We would wait until we could get some assistance, but it's best to move the hive before it really starts to expand with the warming temperatures...in other words, now. We were forced to jump in. We read a book and watched some videos, starting to prep while we continued trying to wrap our heads around what we were going to have to do. 

First step, order the hive. It's cheaper if it comes unassembled and unpainted AND assembling it yourself forces you to really get to understand all the parts of a hive. But wait...the kit comes with two medium sized boxes. Will we need more for a 40 year old hive? Sam and I used the thermal camera to investigate. The first image is from the garage. We thought we were going to have to remove the panelling but this picture showed the bees to be in the ceiling. When we checked out the outside, the camera confirmed the hive was in the soffit...not the walls. Much more straightforward we hoped. And, the hive didn't seem as big as we thought. Still, I bought two extra deep boxes just in case. The colony usually expands in size over spring/summer, so it's good to have extra on hand anyway. 

Spend a few days assembling, and it's time to prime and paint. You only do so on the outside of the hive. 

Fast forward a week and a half to yesterday, and it's time to get started. We began gathering supplies around 7:00am and were out the door and set up at 7:30am. Nene graciously agreed to come watch Rylee while we worked. 

Don't we look dorky...I mean cute? I was too cheap to buy the full suits, so we went with gloves, hats and veils, and duct tape around our shoes. For the most part, the outfits were successful but, unfortunately, Sam kept getting bees in his veil and got stung in the face several times. Let's just say that today he's a little more disliking of bees than he was yesterday. 

Removing the old beehive was a piece of cake. It was very old and fragile. Next came removing the trim, which took a little more effort. 

The first look at the bees was incredible. The bees seemed to fill two rafters, and they were strangely calm. We took the trim board down with only a few of them flying around to inspect us. The rest were either too sleepy or too cold to bother with us and stayed put. 

When Sam took the soffit down, we were blown away. The hive was HUGE. 

Sam decided to start with the smaller section. First, smoke the bees to get them off the comb. 

(The comb itself was gorgeous!) 

Then, Sam carefully cut the comb down piece by piece and handed it to me. 

Between the two of us, we identified the comb as either brood comb (where the baby bees are) or honey comb. For the most part, all the brood was in the left rafter while the honey was in the right. Brood comb is usually capped with a domed yellow cap whereas if the honey is capped it's a more of a whitish color and indented. When in doubt, you can break a few open with the tip of your knife and look for the presence of a little white grub. These are the baby bee larvae. 

The concept is fairly straightforward. You just cut the old comb into pieces that will fit in the frame, and then rubber band the comb to the frames and place them in the appropriate box (brood comb we put in the smaller boxes to be placed at the bottom of the hive; honey comb we put in the larger boxes to be place at the top of the hive). Once the bees fill in the gaps, they will chew through the rubber bands and fly them out of the hive. The only grossness that came with my job is that cutting the comb into sections often involved slicing right through brood, so you ended up with a lot of gooey white bee larvae on the table and on your knife. Not to mention that the bees were not entirely afraid of the knife, so I may have chopped off a few bee butts accidentally. Whoops. 

The Queen bee (much larger than the other bees with a long skinny butt) is usually around the brood comb, and we had every intention of finding her. But as time went on and Sam moved further into the rafter, the comb pieces grew larger and larger. Sam and I estimate that we personally handled ~90,000 bees just by moving combs with about 10,000 remaining in the old hive even after we finished removing all the comb. We were optimistic at the start that we could find her, but by the end of the day we knew we really stood no chance if we were going to finish removing the hive with any amount of sanity (and energy) left. 

We cut and framed comb for almost ten straight hours (only stopping for one bathroom break and an early snack break while we let the camera battery recharge. Here are some highlights from our day. 

At one point I acquired some hitchhikers cheering me on. 

More brood comb. 

The comb went ridiculously far back into the rafters. You can see there used to be hive present in the leftmost rafter, but it's been long gone. 

Smoking to calm the bees and remove them from the comb. 

Not that the brood comb wasn't exciting, but the honey comb was SUPER NEAT! We ended up filling three mixing bowls with pieces that were too small to frame for us to eat later. I need to figure out how to extract honey from the comb and filter it! For now, it was really yummy on my sour-dough toast this morning. 

Look at the honey dripping! Once Sam started cutting into the honey comb, the honey would drip down onto the ground. We got honey everywhere. All over our clothes, our equipment, the tables, everything. 

There was so much honey on the table from cutting comb that the bees kept getting stuck in it and dying as we were framing comb. Poor things. I was constantly having to scrape dead bees and honey off the table in preparation for the next piece of comb needing to be framed. 

Definitely one of the largest pieces we found. 

We filled frame after frame, super after super, leaving only 5 empty frames out of the 40 I had purchased. Thank goodness we bought extra. 

The end totals were roughly 20 frames of brood, 5 frames of pollen (used for beebread aka baby bee and queen bee food), and 10 deep frames of honey. It took us nearly 10 hours to remove the hive working with minimal breaks. We didn't find the queen, like I said, but we moved around 90,000 bees which Sam estimated to weigh around 100lbs when you include the comb. 

We were a little sad to see that 10-15,000 bees remained on the wood rafters after we finished framing all the hive. Some videos we had seen showed beekeepers using paint scrapers (we tried to use a dough scraper because our paint scraper was missing) to scoop up the leftover bees and drop them onto the hive boxes when they didn't have a bee vacuum to help them. We attempted this, but the bees were too stirred up by then to be calm. I moved maybe twenty bees that way. So Sam and I spent probably 20 minutes constructing a makeshift bee vacuum out of a shop vac, an old rag, duct tape, and a box. It was somewhat successful, but about half of the bees Sam poured on the box took to the air, and man were they mad. After several attempts, we had to give up and leave the angry bees be to find their own way to the new hive. 

Inspections this morning revealed, sadly, 1/3-1/2 of the bee population had returned to the old hive spot. Googling last night told us we placed the new hive too far away and confused the bees (10 ft versus the 3 we were supposed to, sigh at the slight ridiculousness). Sam bravely geared back up this morning to move the beehive onto a table below the old hive. He happily reported after a milk run that he saw bees coming and going from the bottom entrance to the new hive. So maybe the remaining bees will move on their own after all! 

For now, we are exhausted, don't want to think about bees (although we need to buy more supers and frames AND extract and filter the three bowls of honey we collected as "scrap" yesterday), don't want to go outside to be around the still angry bees, and don't want to do much of anything but sleep. We are tired, a little cranky, have some tender and itchy spots, but we are proud. We did something we never thought ourselves capable of doing. We saw something AMAZING, perhaps one of the coolest things we've ever seen. We were brave, we worked hard and hopefully (fingers-crossed), all our effort will not be for naught. Here's hoping we captured the queen, the rest of the bees will move, and we will be able to harvest delicious honey in a few months. 

(Small caveat for those worrying about us not catching the queen. Worst case, the worker bees that remain in the new hive will grow a new queen in a mere 16 days. There will be a slight reduction in the growth of the hive in between now and then but given the amount of brood that we moved, shouldn't bee too much of a probably. If the old queen have remained on our house walls with the missing 10-15,000 and they don't move to the new hive, the worker bees will rally around her and start to build a new hive. Worst case, we buy another hive and end up with two. Annoying, but not necessarily a loss.) <-- I think. I should probably remind you that Sam and I have practically no experience, but this is our understanding from what research we have done on the matter. We are choosing to be optimistic.  

Pax Domini cum spirito tuo temper sit,

Torey, Sam & Rylee

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