Backyard Shed Full of Bees

i got a call to remove a colony of honeybees that had been living in this backyard shed for at least two years the landlord was going to call an exterminator to get rid of the bees but the family who lived here wanted to save the bees so they called me i slowly went into the shed and i used a thermal imaging camera to see the colony's size and location the brood nest is the heart of the hive and it's the bright yellow area you see here it's where the queen laser eggs and the bees keep the brood nest at a constant temperature of around 95 degrees fahrenheit the floor of the shed was made up of a few pieces of plywood so after i carefully cut through the first one i gave the bees some more smoke to keep them calm and i lifted up the floor this is always my favorite part of any bee removal and it always feels like such a privilege to enter their world this hive was absolutely beautiful and there were even more bees than i expected i always try to make the removal process as easy on the bees as possible but in order to expose the entire hive i had to pull up another piece of the floor this section is where the brood nest and most of the hive was located and i tried to lift it as slowly as possible to keep it all intact it was pretty heavy but most of the combs stayed in place now that i had the entire hive exposed i could get to work removing the structure of the hive and relocating the bees my goal is always to give the bees as many pieces from their original hive as possible and i try to put the pieces in the new hive in the same order that the bees built them the rubber bands help support the weight of the comb and they hold everything in place during transport and until the bees can produce enough beeswax to attach the pieces of their old hive to the wooden frames of their new hive once the bees have attached the comb to the frames they'll drag the rubber bands out of the hive since the bees like to keep their hive nice and tidy i spent at least an hour carefully working my way through the hive and removing comb from the floor of the shed and putting it into frames luckily a lot of the bees stayed on the comb as i worked so many of the bees went right into their new hive along with each piece of the old hive that i removed one of the reasons i love doing bee removals is because they allow me to see how bees build their hives naturally when i'm with a colony of wild bees i get to study the choices that the colony has made for itself instead of the choices a beekeeper made for it after i removed all of the comb i used my smoker to herd some of the bees into their new hive when used properly the smoke does not harm the bees and since they react to smoke the same way we do by moving away from it beekeepers use smoke as a tool to gently move bees around as we work as i smoked one corner of the original hive a steady stream of bees started to scurry out from under the floor i had not yet seen the queen so i just waited and watched the bees to see if i could spot the queen in the rush after watching the stream of bees for about 15 minutes i saw the queen so i put her in a beekeeping clip called a queen clip to keep her safe you can see here how much larger she is than the other bees these clips are designed with slots so that the worker bees can pass through freely to attend to the queen but i've had some smaller queens escape before so i usually put a rubber band around them now after i got the queen settled in i gave the bees a hand by scooping them into their new hive this is just a simple way for me to move a mass of bees from one location to another and as soon as i put these bees near their hive they marched right in since there were quite a few clusters of bees hanging from the floor of the shed i just kept scooping in handful after handful they kept going right into the hive since they wanted to be with their queen and with their colony once i got even more bees into the new hive some of the bees started sending homing signals to the rest of the colony to tell them where their new hive was located they do this by exposing a gland at the end of their abdomen to release a pheromone which they send out into the world by fanning their wings from that point on all the bees knew to get into their new hive but they needed plenty of time to do so so i left the hive in the shed overnight when i went back the next morning the entire colony had moved into the new hive and it was another great day of saving the bees you

Channel: Texas Beeworks

Views: 450,548

Keywords: Honeybees, Bee Removal, Beekeeping

Id: a_VBqXouGgE

Length: 4min 30sec (270 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021