Massive Beehive Removal from the Neighborhood Tree

I was just enjoying a Tuesday afternoon when I get a call from the tree trimmer Peter who says he has just cut a hollowed out limb from 20 feet up and that there are a mess of bees flying around. I find out that the tree is the one I walk by everyday with my girls to admire the feral hive, so I feel a special attachment to these ladies. 

 Here is the hollowed out limb that took a 20 foot tumble as Peter was trimming out the hollowed out sections of a cottonwood. It's laying in the middle of the road with a riot of bees zooming around, trying to figure out where the heck they are!

 They used to live way up there.

 I pull out my bee vacuum and an empty mini top bar hive.

 Peter the amazing tree dude, doesn't even blink an eye. He shrugs on my extra bee suit and starts to cut the large branch with a chainsaw into sections that I can get my hive tool into and start pulling out the brood (babies) and honey.

 Peter then lends a hand by vacuuming out the bees from the hollowed out branch while I start to pull out the comb and stack it in the back of the top bar hive. I'm trying to make the hive as enticing as possible for the bees. We are looking for the queen at the same time. 1 bee out of 60,000. Once we get her, we can cage her and put her into the new hive. Where the queen goes, the rest of the bees go.

 The inside of the branches are completely coated in propolis and beeswax. After the bees are cleaned out of each section of tree, we bag the limbs so we can get rid of delicious smells of home that will entice the bees away from the hive I am trying to move the bees into.

Bagged Limb. 

Yeah, Peter rocks. If you need someone to trim trees in the Santa Fe area, give this guy a call!!!! 505-310-2050. He is part monkey with his incredible climbing abilities and has a heart of gold.

 Peter then brings down the rest of the branch because half the hive was still in the tree. We still haven't found the queen and didn't want to leave a totally exposed beehive in the tree. He used a hand saw to bring the rest of the branch down and then cut it into workable pieces on the ground with the chainsaw.

 I ran out of room in the mini hive, so started transferring everything to a large sized hive.

 This limb also held a colony of carpenter ants that were scurrying around, trying to move their babies.

 Oi, the queen is in this last piece of branch!!!! We delicately cut the branch (with a chainsaw) to try and get to the queen. I have her in my hands and then... she flies away! I try and track her flight, but she is one of 1000's of bees swirling in the middle of the street.

Se la vie. I dump the vacuum into the beehive and hope that the enticing smell of all the honeycomb and brood (babies) will keep the bees there, even though the queen isn't in the hive. Peter has cut the branch to way beyond the hive, so even without the queen, I'm hoping that the bees will move into the hive because there is nothing left of their old home.

 I set up a "safety zone" with a couple of sawhorses and some orange tape to keep people from getting too close. I have to wait until night falls to move the hive, otherwise I miss all the foragers that are still out in the field and gobs of bees that are disoriented and trying to find home.

Night falls and the bees have moved into the hive! I'm hoping that the queen found the hive after she flew off. In order to move the hive to the South Valley, I tape a wire mesh all over the top of the hive. There are huge clumps of bees hanging out on the roof. I trap them under the mesh so that they don't crawl all over my body and the pickup truck during the big move.

Cutout complete. Without Peter, this would have taken me countless hours and tree cutting skills I can't even begin to fathom. I would still be looking up at that tree limb, 20 feet up, scratching my head.

Whoops, magically made a top bar out of my langstroth

And now for my next trick: I went to check my first Langstroth hive ever that started out as a swarm capture.... only to find that I had magically turned a Langstroth Hive into a Top Bar Hive. Whoops. Here is the sweet little swarm that I caught from the back of the store "Trucks R Us".

Trucks R Us Swarm Before

Trucks R Us Swarm After

Here is my sweet little swarm magically turned into a top bar hive, only without the removable frames.

Oi, I had to do an extraction on my own darned hive. Turns out, I put frames in the lower brood box, but didn't think to put frames in the upper brood box where I decided to hang my black inner feeder. Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking either!

Problem solved. I had some wired frames hanging around and my good friend Becky Tomato helped me rubber band the comb to the frames. It's hard to see in the picture, but there are 3 wires running across the frames.The trick to attaching comb to frames is that there is an up and a down to comb. The comb is tipped slightly upwards so that honey doesn't run out of the hexagons.

Meanwhile, my high school chum was cheering us on and her lovely husband was providing shade with a large piece of corrugated metal. It's top notch checking bees with other people!

Bee Rescue, Cottonwood Madonna and Miracles

This morning I received an early morning call from a good friend of mine who said that the Cottonwood tree behind the 300 year old San Felipe church in Old Town Albuquerque blew over last night in the 60 mile per hour winds.... and that there was a hive of bees in one of the tree trunks freezing to death on the asphalt. Here is a history of the tree and the Virgin that I pulled from the book NM Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities and Other Offbeat Stuff:
          "It's a wooden statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and the figure is actually whittled into the tree trunk. It was carved more than fifty years ago by Toby Avila, a parish member. Avila was on active duty in the US Navy during the Korean Conflict and vowed that if he returned safely, he would create an image of the Blessed Virgin to show his gratitude.
          Using only a kitchen knife and a flashlight, Avila chipped away the tree trunk for a year before the statue was finished." Avila passed away as soon as the statue was completed.

I pulled out my equipment and drove the few blocks to old town to assess the situation. It looked like a hurricane blew through and there was a softball size of bees freezing to death on the ground.

 The Virgin is carved beautifully into the heart of the tree trunk

My top bar hive sits in front of the wreckage. The bees are in a clump behind the hive.

The virgin survived within the tree trunk

Unbelievably, the tree completely missed the Church and fell around the building.

 Here are the clump of bees that survived the blistering cold all night long, nestled together.

Here is my equipment laid out. I used a vacuum to suck up the bees. I collected all the honeycomb I could gather and piled it into the back of the topbar beehive so the bees could have some food to get them through the freezing temperatures. I then emptied the tupperwear container that I vacuumed all the bees into into the beehive on to the honey reserves.

The are in the inner chamber of my tupperwear, huddled in the far corner.

I dumped the bees into the beehive

And closed it up

The bees are now in my backyard. I hope to combine them with a trapout that has plenty of bees and not much honey. This newly rescued hive has plenty of honey, but not that many bees so it will make the perfect union. Will these bees survive? Doubtful, but miracles are known to happen. The gigantic Cottonwood Virgin tree fell around a church and didn't destroy a thing.

Home Sweet Home. 

This queen bee plays hard to get- Bee Cutout from the floor of a shed

Looks like a fingerprint made out of honey comb

Last night I helped extract a hive of bees living in the floor of a shed in the heights. The weird thing about this extraction is that these bees had already been extracted. This was the second time this colony had been pulled out of the floor in the last 2 weeks. The first time, Les Crowder's fantastic Cutout/Trapping class spent a full day, sawing at the floor and pulling out fist fulls of bees and honey and comb. Because there were so many bees and so many places for the queen to hide, they were never able to find the queen. She was most likely hiding somewhere in the deepest darkest corner between some joists. Long story short, the class captured as many bees as they could, set up the hive with brood and crossed their fingers that the queen was one of the 80,000+ bees that they had scooped out of the floor. In the 2 weeks since the class, the bees had moved back into the shed and were now building comb off of the piece of wood covering the cutout hole and along the wall.

2 week old comb 

The top bar hive with the board with brood hanging from the top

The owner of the shed, Robert, is an aspiring beekeeper and he happily helped in the extraction. The first step to removing the bees was to remove the wood plank hanging over the hole. This board had comb and bees hanging off of an edge so we placed the entire thing over the empty top bar hive off to the side to mess with later. We then draped a sheet over the empty holes in the shed floor to prevent the queen from escaping into the deep, dark depths of the floor. We then discovered the row of new comb along the wall of the shed and we fired up the bee vacuum. We went through one piece of comb at a time looking for the queen, sucking up the bees on each side of the comb and then placing the comb at an angle along the back end of the empty hive.

By this point I noticed that the bees in the hive, that were hanging on the loose board had their rear ends in the air and were fanning the nazanov pheromone, saying this is your home, come on over. I suspected this was a good sign that the queen might actually be in the hive box. We finished cleaning out the brood comb (babies) from the wall, and placing it into the hive box. We angled the brood comb so that the nurse bees could still get to the brood and the babies would have the possibility of being able to grow to maturation. I also left about 15 inches of empty space at the front of the hive so that the bees could start building new comb. They won't use the old comb that we cut out, except to rob it for honey, pollen and hopefully nurse the brood until they are ready to hatch.

Next we moved on to cutting off the comb from the 3' by 4' board that was placed over the hive. Because the comb hanging off of the board was already so close to the hive, I turned off the vacuum and place this comb and all the bees hanging directly into the hive, still looking for the queen bee. I had cut off all the comb and came to a large clump of bees that I suspected was where the queen bee was. In hind sight, I should have picked through this clump and tried to cage her or at least place her directly and safely inside the hive. Instead, after 2.5 sweat covered hours of work, I took the board and and gave it a good jolt to knock the bees into the hive.

Finally, we placed the hive full of brood comb with the entrance close to the entrance where the bees were entering the shed so that we could attract the field force, out collecting pollen and nectar back to the new hive. All that was left was to shake all the bees from the inner chamber of the bee vac into the hive. I then closed up the hive by placing all of the top bars into place.

Bee vac inner chamber full of bees waiting to be introduced to their new home

We still couldn't find that queen bee, but I'm crossing my fingers that the cut out worked.

Home, sweet home

Robert working hard for his bees! Great job, you deserved these lovelies. 

Big City, Tiny Hive- underneath a water meter cover

We just rescued the tiniest, cutest hive from underneath a water meter cover this week from downtown Albuquerque.

Can you spot our entrance hole?  

This next picture is the flip side of the water meter cover. The tiniest hive ever. 

James looking preppy, beekeeping cool and the bee vacuum (The clear tupperwear container on the left). I tweaked with the vacuum and it actually worked on this one! As opposed to the last time, when we kept sucking at those bees and they kept on holding on to each other's legs 'n junk and I vacuumed up maybe 1 bee. The bee vacuum works by sucking the bees into an inner chamber that has lots of breathable mesh sides so they don't overheat. I can remove the inner chamber and put in a new one if there are gobs of bees and they don't fit. There wasn't a power source nearby so were able to borrow an emergency battery operated vacuum from our friend Michael, who is practically his own Home Depot, with all the power tools he owns. 

We sucked up the bees, drove them to Bosque Farms and joined them with a weak beehive, Canada. I joined the 2 hives because I didn't think either of them could raise a big enough workforce to survive next winter. To join the hives, I took a wet piece of newspaper and completely closed off 1/2 of Canada's hive box. I then emptied the water meter bees into the back, empty part of the Canada hive. Within the next 2-3 days the 2 separate hives will chew their way to each other through the newspaper. Guess what happens next? The queen bees fight to the death. This seems to be the way every story I tell ends these days.