My friend Doug came over to my mom’s house this morning, and we found the beehive under the eave and cut them out!
I used my digital camera for taking the video and captured a fair amount of the process. My mom stayed inside and fought the bees that found their way in the house (about 10 of them), while Katie, Doug, and I donned our suits and worked on the outside.
Katie and Doug escaped being stung, happily, while I was stung twice: Once when the fold of the veil touched the back of my neck, allowing a bee to sting me there, and then a bee managed to crawl in between the two zippers that attach the veil to the suit, getting into my face area, which was disconcerting.
The bee stung me in the mustache/lip area and then flew in my nose, which was an unpleasant sensation. However, due to Katie and Doug’s quick thinking, only one bee got inside my veil.
We collected around 25 pounds of honey, which we will have to crush and strain. The strange thing was that we found little to no brood: no eggs, not much larva, and hardly any capped cells; the larva and capped cells we did see we suspect were drone brood, which could indicate a laying worker bee and a queenless hive.
Why would the hive be queenless? We don’t know. The hive could have swarmed some weeks ago, the old queen leaving with the swarm and the new hive trying to raise a new queen but failing. Or the queen could have been around there somewhere but just not laying much, or there could be some other pocket of comb we didn’t see that the bees get to through a small hole, but we doubt this.
We left a beehive box and dumped a bunch of bees into it, so if the queen was one of them, they could (hopefully) decide to all fly into the box and make that their new home. I will go back to mom’s house tomorrow to check it out.
Very interesting! How long would it have taken the bees to make that sized home? I’m glad they didn’t pick my house!! How much honey will be lost when you crush & strain it? Glad to see you’re having fun!
Hi Jenny!
The bees could theoretically have made that sized home in only one year, but because of the look of the comb (quite black) and because of the existence of a queen cell, we think that the bee hive had been there at least 2 years.
Also, my mother has seen bees in the house since she moved in about two years ago.
The queen cell is interesting because it was in a location that indicates the bees had swarmed this year or in the past. The queen cell looks like a peanut, but this one was already broken open sometime ago by the queen emerging or by the bees dismantling it.
We had to throw away about 20% of the honey because it fell in the dirt or was so covered in bees that we couldn’t manage it, but we should be able to get a good 20 pounds of honey from what we did salvage.
You guys are nuts (and thats coming from me!)
Enjoyed watching the adventure with the bees. Do you know what kind of bees they were – European or African? We saw a Discovery show today explaining the nature and invasion of the Africanized bees. The show said we just have to learn to live with them, because they cannot be killed off.
Gotta love them bees!
Excellent video, by the way. You should document your return trips this week to keep us updated.
- Gerardo
Love the video credits!
I’d be very interested to see the honey after you’ve processed it.
Frances
Thanks y’all! We will take pictures of the honey when we crush and strain it.
Brian, they are most certainly European honeybees, probably Italians, which is the most populous strain. Africanized bees would have hive-defended much more aggressively than these did, and we would not have tried to save the hive if they were africanized but rather just have killed them.
It is true that we have to just live with the africanized bees, like fire ants. When they are found the hives can be destroyed but they swarm and spread and even take over hives at times, so they would be very difficult to totally eradicate.