I've been meaning to add a few things to this blog since I stopped in 2007 ... I even have a few draft posts out there (the trip to Mexico eight months ago, for instance) but have just never made the time to finish them. Perhaps it is not very evident, but I really don't make a good blogger. Not that I'm going to start back up, but I might TRY to post some stuff a little more frequently. This seems like a good location for longer tales, and our little honey bee saga several weekends ago is definitely a longer tale that I wanted to write down somewhere, so here we go.
First things first: last May we started noticing some honey bees hanging out around a hole in our house toward the roof above our back door. The hole APPEARS to have been for an exterior light since there is a box in it, but I took a look when we first bought the house, and I could find no wires to the box. Back in the day when I was up on that ladder and realized there were no wires and that I wasn't going to put in a light immediately, I should have probably covered the hole. Hmmmm. But I didn't. So, over the course of the summer, there were more and more bees. Hundreds of bees in fact. They were very docile and we could very easily go in and out the back door, even hang out directly below their new home, without any aggression.
The number of bees flying around this hole grew quickly over the summer and we began thinking about the fact that eventually we would need to get the bees OUT of the house. An initial concern was rot that could be caused by honey in the wall; however, in reality, as long as the bees were alive, they would maintain the honey and there would likely be no issues. Another issue was, oh, the now thousands of bees flying around above the door. Not a giant worry, but not exactly ideal either. We called a couple of beekeepers in August/September and they were very flaky: one scheduled some time to come out and never showed and the other simply never called us back. I realized later that this was because right before winter is NOT a good time to take over a hive of bees. The bees have established a good honey supply over the spring and summer and would most likely die if moved directly before winter.
The other facet to this story is that I was very interested in keeping the bees myself in the corner of our yard for pollination of our garden and, of course, for honey. Plus walking around the yard in a beekeeping outfit would just look bad-ass. I knew that the start of spring would probably be the best time to relocate the bees, so I took a beekeeping class at a local bee supply store in December and began chatting up our friends Todd and Jess since they kept bees when they lived in California. Along comes March of this year, and I still didn't have much in the way of "plans". Feeling a bit intimidated, I asked Todd and Jess if they would be interested in helping remove the bees from our house to a hive box and then we could share the hive and the honey. They have a new child as well and were feeling a little overwhelmed by the idea of keeping bees right now, but Jess did a bunch of research on the ways to get the bees OUT of the house, and they lent me all the parts to a hive box that they had in their basement with the idea that I would buy it from them if the bee relocation worked out (thanks again guys!).
Then the bees "swarmed" twice in one week.
Swarming typically happens when a colony splits and the queen and a bunch of workers take off looking for better, less crowded digs. The swarm was essentially thousands of bees flying around our back door and over in our neighbor's yard. Our neighbor knew about the bees and was hip to the idea of me keeping them, but she still went running into her house. We decided we needed to do something soon. I talked with Jess and Todd again, then called the bee supply store where I took my class so I could run our removal ideas past them. We were hoping to put a mesh funnel on the hole outside the house (which would allow the bees out but would confuse them coming back in) and then put the hive box near the hole for them to move into. The woman at the bee supply store essentially said that if we didn't cut the wall and remove the honeycomb and the queen, our plan was pure folly. And cutting the wall would involve thousands of angry bees. And it would be best to cut from the outside of the house if you weren't prepared for the thousand angry bees to be INSIDE the house.I decided this needed to be done by someone with some experience. I went back to the Oregon Beekeepers page and called a beekeeper, John, who agreed to come out and assess the situation. He was very laid back about the whole affair and said that he and his father-in-law would cut the bees out of the wall (from the inside) and he would even tie the honeycomb into the frames in my hive box, all for $100 or $150 (he was pretty relaxed about pricing as well ... I paid him $150). Typically honeybee removals involve a decent fee AND the beekeeper takes the bees with him/her, so this was a pretty good deal.
The following Saturday morning John, his father-in-law Byron and two of his daughters (both around 10 years old and pretty knowledgeable about bees) showed up at 7:45 for the operation. The night before I had put a piece of cardboard and a bunch of duct tape over the entrance so that none of the bees would be out foraging when we started the removal. The plan was to cut into the wallboard in our mud room between the kitchen and the basement, so we closed and taped off the kitchen door and hung some plastic in the door to the basement to keep most of the bees out of there.
We then suited up and Byron began cutting the wall with me standing by watching (and taking pictures). These guys had a special kind of vacuum that doesn't injure the bees significantly and dumps them into a box that can then be detached and emptied into a hive. Pretty cool contraption. The operation went very smoothly ... Byron cut the wall little by little and sucked up bees with the vacuum. As he cut, the extent of the honeycombs became more apparent. These buggers had built eight three-foot tall honeycombs between two studs above our back door.
There were bees everywhere and we could also see a couple of queen cells (where queens larva were being raised) as well as a bunch of drone and worker bee cells. Once the majority of the bees were removed, Byron started carefully cutting out the honeycomb and passing it out to John who would then tie the comb into hive frames using twine.
Honey dripped profusely. When all of the bees and honeycomb were removed from between the two studs, Byron noticed a couple of bees crawling from a small crack that led into the region between the next two studs to the right, so he cut the wallboard there as well. He found several hundred more bees, but fortunately no honeycomb. After the vacuuming operation had completed, John took the bee vacuum box back to my new hive in the back corner of our yard, dumped the mound of bees into the hive box and closed the lid (the picture below is after most of them had settled down into the frames). John estimated that there were around 8000 to 10,000 bees living in our wall.
The whole procedure was done by 10:30; Byron got stung once on the wrist and I got stung once on the leg ... pretty good.
John and his crew gave me a few parting words of wisdom before leaving. First, he said that he could not find a queen amongst the bees he dumped into my hive. He suggested I wait a week or two to see if any of the queen cells hatched, but it might be a good idea to go to the bee supply store and buy a queen for good measure. He also said that some of the bees would make their way back to the entrance to the old hive and that I should periodically spray them with sugar water, use a bee brush to brush them into a bag and then carry them back to the hive. Lastly, he said that once the bees got used to their new home, they wouldn't need much attention for quite a while, possibly most of the summer.
As the day progressed, I would suit up occasionally and go out back to see how everything was going. Here and there I went in the back door with a dust buster and vacuumed up the straggler bees that I found. There were quite a few stragglers crawling around, and I found a few in the basement that had gotten around the plastic. At one point I had my first (and possibly only) experience carrying a load of laundry around the house, stain treating a couple of items and starting the wash clothed in a bee veil and bee gloves.
By early afternoon, the ball of bees outside huddled around the old (duct taped) entrance had grown and it seemed like a good time to perform my first beekeeper duty of escorting these lost souls back to their new home. I made some sugar water in a spray bottle, grabbed a ladder, bee brush and paper shopping bag and headed out back. Climbing a ladder to arrive face-to-face with a ball of confused, possibly angry bees is a wonderful experience that everyone should have at least once in their lifetime. I sprayed the sugar water (which is meant to make their wings sticky and sort of pacify them), and this only seemed to confuse them. I learned later that the sugar/water concentration is supposed to be about 50/50 ... mine was more like 5/95. Positioning the stupid bag underneath the bees was entertaining ... it had previously been folded and just wanted to refold, not realizing how important it was to me that it stayed open. Once the bag was adjusted and positioned appropriately, I took the bee brush and brushed the bees toward the bag. Rather than a lump of bees falling gracefully into the bag and me casually closing the bag and walking back to the hive, here's what happened: the bees fell toward the bag, exploded into a cloud, and surrounded me. Trying my best to maintain my cool, I yelled, jumped off the ladder, ran like hell to the hive with the damn bag WIDE OPEN, threw the bag at the hive and began to furiously clean the bees off of me with the bee brush. I don't believe any of my neighbors witnessed this, but man, it had to have been funny to see. I came away from this experience with adrenaline pumping like mad, but not a single sting. Woo hoo.
Later, I went out back and there was another good sized ball of bees on the house. Thinking that being surrounded by a cloud of bees was just something I was going to have to get used to, I positioned the ladder again and headed up to perform my duties. I guess I figured that my issue previously was in the USE of the bee brush, not, say, in my 5 part to 95 part sugar water solution. This time I was going to do it right. Sadly, the EXACT same thing happened again, complete with me screaming and running across the yard. This time I did get stung.
Sam had been planning to go with a friend to a swap of some sort and then on to a movie. The next couple of events happened quickly and were slightly surreal. First, Sam left, I went back to check the laundry and realized that there were still quite a few "stragglers" in the house. Strange. Hazel woke up from her nap. I started to be able to hear the bees through the kitchen door into the mud room. I went around back and noticed that the bees had actually worked the duct tape off of the entrance hole (weak tape? wet?)!! From outside, the window in our mud room was covered with bees ON THE INSIDE!! I called John but he didn't answer. I felt fairly anxious because I now realized the bees were all coming back in the house, and I couldn't really do a thing about it at home alone with Hazel. Argggghhhh!!
So, the day continued on. The ball outside the house
got smaller and smaller and the number of bees visible inside the house grew. I could easily hear a steady drone of bees when I went over to the kitchen door into the mud room. I decided that the best thing I could do was reenforce the taping so the bees would be quarantined in the mud room and the basement. Unfortunately, the duct tape was in the room with the bees and didn't seem to work so well anyway. I went next door to our neighbor Rey's, borrowed some packing tape and double/triple taped around the kitchen door. Then I hunkered down in an old rocking chair facing said door with a shotgun across my lap, fighting sleep and waiting for something to happen (my descent into horror movie comparisons begins).Our friends Bill and Stef came over for dinner and we discussed the deadly peril just a couple feet from where we were eating, held at bay by a couple layers of packing tape. It was dark outside and while doing the dishes, I started hearing a muted buzzing, looked over and saw several bees along the tape at the bottom of the door wiggling like mad trying to get at human flesh. Stef mentioned that they were attracted to the light, and this gave me an idea. I suited up, went to the garage and lit a gas lantern. I then made my way to the back door, carefully opened it and extended the lantern inside.
The scene that confronted me was creepy as all hell. First of all, the room was very warm, almost humid. Believe it or not, bees actually poop: it shows up as long brown streaks (which is all over the back of our house) and smells like cat urine. The room I was leaning into smelled of cat piss, honeycomb and honey. If I could bottle this smell and sent it to all of you, I would. There were a few bees buzzing around here and there. The floor was littered with hive pieces and bee corpses ... stepping into the room, bees crunched under my feet. But most terrifying was the pulsing mass of bees attached to one of the shelves in the mud room. The mass was larger than a football. There was also a smaller mass by the window.
So, my thought was "hey, these bees seem interested in light, why don't I give them a big lantern, leave the door open, they'll flock towards it and I'll close the door behind them". But the bees didn't seem very interested in the light. I then decided that they might need to be "awakened". I took a handful of pebbles from our back yard and tossed them at the mass. Nothing. I then decided that I would try to knock them off their roost, thinking then they would possibly take interest in the lantern. No big sticks anywhere, a broom would be fantastic for the task at hand. Looking back into the mud room, I saw the broom at the top of the stairs, leaning against the wall ... mere inches from the mass of bees!! Very, very carefully, I stepped into the mud room and made my way up the stairs, trying not to step on any live bees. (Apparently when bees are squashed, they give off a pheromone that attracts other bees to the spot). Reaching, reaching. I managed to get the broom, slowly back down the stairs, position myself in ready-to-run mode in the back door ... then I reached in with the broom, swatted the mass off the wall and ran like mad up front, leaving the back door open. About a half hour later I suited back up and went out back to check on the situation. I was thinking there might be a little bit of mass pandemonium around the lantern, but quite the contrary: there were only one or two bees there. Picking up the lantern and peeking back inside, I saw the mass of bees was simply lying on the ground, right where I had swatted them to.
So, here's how the story ends. I could barely go to sleep that night, anxious that bees were going to get into the house sometime in the night or early morning (by the way, I can sleep sitting up on a bus). At 8:00 in the morning, I headed downstairs and found that, thankfully, no bees had made it through our packing tape defenses. Seconds later, John called. He said that he had worried that something like this might happen. (Was this a beekeeper's trial by fire?) When a beekeeper wants to move a hive of bees from one side of the yard to another, he/she first should move the hive about five miles down the road, wait a week or two, then move it back to the desired location. Bees establish flight patterns and it can be very hard for them to change when they detect familiar landmarks. Attempting to place a hive in the back of our yard only confused the bees. John revealed that he KNEW all of this, but that I seemed so excited about keeping the bees that he had just decided to see how everything went.
John and his gang arrived about an hour later, he suited up and went in to re-vacuum the bees. At one point he stepped outside and asked his daughter to check that there were no openings in his bee gear because the bees were very "ornery". I imagine having your home demolished in front of you, being sucked into a giant vacuum and then dumped unceremoniously into a new, smaller apartment with most of your furnishings cut in half, going back to the bare earth where your old home once stood, camping out there, remembering good times, perhaps singing all night, then come daybreak being sucked into a giant vacuum AGAIN could be frustrating. My bees left with John that morning, and I got up on a ladder and nailed a piece of wood across the old entrance.
There were still some bees to be dust busted out of the house, most in the mud room but a couple in the basement as well. A ball of determined bees began forming outside of the entrance, but not nearly as large as the ones I bee-brushed. Over the course of two days, the little ball seemed to be sliding down the wall, then one day it was gone. No dead bees lying around, just gone. I still have Jess and Todd's hive box in the garage, there's a good sized hole above our back door and, believe it or not, I still am contemplating buying some bees.
