Our Sunday afternoon was spent on a fun and satisfying bee removal. A customer had a swarm move into her tires that were stacked in her garden. She complained that she couldn't do any gardening because the bees were constantly stinging her. Along we came to the rescue!
It didn't even take that long. We quickly identified which tire the bees had built their combs in. Once the tire was cut open, we placed a hive close by and started cutting out the combs from the tire and placing them into frames (securing them with elastic bands) and placing them into the hive.
The goal is usually to find the queen and place her in the hive, because then all the other bees will come swarming into your hive as they sense the queens pheromones and hurry to her location. Lucky for us, we realized we had gotten the queen into the hive either while shaking the bees off the combs and into the hives, or simply by scooping masses of them up by hand and dropping them into the hive. We knew we had secured the queen early on because the bees quickly made their way into the hive from the start of the removal. They weren't frantically flying around the whole yard in search of their queen.
After all the major work was done, we patiently waited for the bees to naturally make their way into the hive. This took a while so we decided to go enjoy a warm coffee and return about 30 minutes after dark to take the hive to a different location. We waited until after dark because by that time, the bees will have searched for a warm home and wouldn't be wasting their time and energy during the night.
When we returned, we were delighted to see that all the bees had made their way into the hive; not one was flying around! We loaded the hive onto the vehicle and made our way to a nearby farm where we had gotten permission to leave the bees.
Oh, and a highlight for me was witnessing a bee coming out of its cocoon for the first time!
I certainly enjoyed this experience and learnt 3 new things:
1. When I stand to the side and don't help out much, I tend to focus more on the bees and I become nervous. However, if I involve myself on the job, I forget about the bees because I'm concentrating on the work, and I don't feel anxious at all.
2. One way you can tell whether or not you have secured the queen is examining the behavior of the bees. If they are frantically flying all over the place and start heading towards different locations and start gathering or clustering in different spots far from their hive, such as a tree a few meters away, the queen has flown off and they are searching for her. But as in our case, the bees easily made their way into the hive that we set out for them, meaning the queen was already inside.
3. Even though there was not one bee left on site, and we had removed all traces of the comb, it is likely that this client will have another bee problem in the near future. Why? Simply because it is such a lovely and convenient spot for the bees to set up their hive. So the best thing to do in such a situation would be to set up a catch box, so that when a new swarm of bees return, they will lean towards setting up camp in the catch box which can easily be removed and taken away.
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