Today has been one of the weirder days in beekeeping. If you'll remember last Friday I got a call from my husband to come check out a bee colony that had moved into the wall of the apartment complex he works at. I get there and sure enough, there are bees flying in and out. Some carrying pollen. The resident says that they have been there for two weeks or so. Talking to the maintenance guy, who thankfully has participated in cutouts before and knows not only what to expect, but also why spraying them is a horrible idea, he seems to think that if the resident has noticed them for a week then they've been there for at least 3 weeks. So, we formulate a plan of attack. My husband and I will build a bee vac and bring bee suits and hive tools. We both spend the weekend watching videos of other people doing cutouts.
I took a few hours off work today and head over to the apartments. My husband had already started working on the bee vac. We built it using a Styrofoam cooler, an old package box, some extra tubing, and a shop vac. There is a hold in the cooler that can be used to regulate the suction. If it looks like they are getting overheated, we can put an icepack in with them to cool them down.
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| I didn't think this was too bad for a short-notice attempt |
So, bee vac is built and we pack all the stuff into the Jeep and head over to the building with the bees...
And nothing.
No bees. No bees flying. No dead bees. No sign of them being sprayed. We even took a piece of the siding off and knocked on the underboard. Nothing. It was like they absconded over the weekend. Damn. I really wanted that colony.
I have been a beek 7 years, using only feral survivor stock in Los Angeles. I make a good deal of my living doing structural removals, teaching beekeeping, selling nucs and honey, and doing presentations. I would never use a vac for such a brief occupancy of bees. Even one of a month or two. Just don't need it for the number of combs and population of bees. I have two vacs---a smaller bucket-type vac for open air hives in trees, working on a ladder, or smaller jobs and the second vac, the BushKill vac that blows the bees into a full size Lang hive body and is used with large jobs. Did you view any combs built when you opened the wall? The description sounds like you did not actually open the area they may have been using ---or maybe just scouting. The BEST bees come from the ones proving they don't need humans putting stuff on them to manage pests and diseases. Randy Oliver names them resilient "founder colonies" and they don't come from absconding package bees under pressure from mites.
ReplyDeleteReally cutouts aren't something that I ever planned on doing and it's not something that I really have any desire to do so I didn't see the value in buying a vac that may or may not have been needed (and obviously it wasn't, lol). The only reason this one was on the table was because my husband's management wouldn't consider paying someone else to do it and his co-worker had participated in cutouts before. We didn't see any comb, but then again maintenance wasn't willing to cut open a bigger hole than absolutely necessary and I can't say that I blame them because they are the ones who will be putting the pieces back together. Looking back now, I'd say that it was probably scouting, but it sure seemed like there was a lot of activity for that to have been what it was. We're now about 6 weeks out and there is no sign of that colony anywhere. No one else has reported bees living in the walls (though I'm not sure how many people in an apartment complex would actually notice if it were in an out of the way place like an eave). My husband and his cohort have been actively looking for them for awhile as his coworker would like to have a hive. I would love to have some local survivor stock, but I currently don't have the room to expand.
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