A Summer of Strange Removal Jobs - Part I

I have done 4 honey bee removal jobs this summer and they have all been unusual in their own way. I worked with Joel and Jeff Eckel, of We Bee Brothers fame, on each of the jobs (though that's not the unusual part!). Maybe this wacky hot weather is causing some of this weird stuff, who knows. Let's have ourselves a looksie...

The first removal of the summer was at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in an old abandoned Navy theater that is being renovated into medical offices. The foreman of the demolition team called me in an effort to remove and save the bees before they needed to destroy and redo the roof. The bees were entering the building in the gaping hole in the top right corner of the building. 

The inside of the building was totally bombed out, there were no stairs to get up to the 2nd floor, so we had to haul our stuff up a ladder...

We would access the bees from a little bathroom and when I opened the door, my mouth dropped open. On the floor of this room was a tremendous pile of dead bees, 2 inches deep in places. I had never seen anything like it. I think that all that it meant was that this colony had been here a long time and this was just the accumulation of years of dead bees. I wish I could share the funky smell with you...

  Anyway, we set up some scaffolding and Jeff got to work and opened the ceiling to reveal the hive.

We vacuumed bees and removed comb. Jeff spotted a bunch of swarm cells as he was vacuuming bees and we quickly realized that we got this hive just as they were preparing to swarm. Lucky us! We got to see 6 or 7 virgin queens hatching out of their cells, a couple of them came out right into my hands (sorry no pictures)! When a hive is getting ready to swarm the workers will keep the queens in their cells until the colony decides that it is time to swarm. The workers will feed the queens through a small hole in the queen cell and they will keep adding wax to the cell as the queen tries to emerge, effectively keeping her confined until they are ready to let her out. Once we disturbed the hive, the workers could no longer attend to the queen cells and the queens were able to leave their cells. Pretty awesome! We caught 3 of the virgin queens and put them in queen cages with a few worker bees to attend to them. We would try, unsuccessfully, to get those virgin queens mated in our beeyards.




There were some parts of the hive that were tucked up in the rafters and we really couldn't access them without causing major structural damage to the building. I worked on tying the comb into frames in my little blue workshop (picture below) across the hall, nice ehh?

We removed as many bees and as much comb as possible and I think the demolition team just killed the remaining bees a few days later. I set these bees up in my Francisville apiary and when I went to check on them 10 days later - the hive was totally empty of bees! They left me! I think they were still in swarm mode and they just took off to who knows where. So, unfortunately, when it was all said and done I didn't get to keep the genetics and add this colony to my apiary. This is the first time I have ever had a colony abscond on me, drats!






The second removal job of the summer was in Conshohocken. Remember the swarm I caught earlier in the summer out in Conshy? Well, a few weeks after that one, I got a call from the same homeowner telling me there was ANOTHER swarm in his yard. Here's a quick video from that second swarm in Conshy, I caught the swarm actually happening and stood in the middle of it as I took the video. It was quite an exhilarating experience to stand in the middle of these bees! Turn up the volume so you can hear them!



I knew that both of these swarms came from a house nearby where bees were living in the walls and this was the second removal job of the summer. Joel and I did it a month after I had captured the second swarm. Fellow Guild member Amy Hsu watched us and took some great photos - all of the photos below were taken by Amy. When I got to the house and took a look at the spot where the bees had been entering the house, I saw something odd - there was no traffic going in and out. It was a warm summer day and the hive should have been busy working. I stood there for a few minutes and saw only one or two bees go in. Hmmm...

We got to work. We opened the ceiling and this is what we saw...

Wavy Honey Comb

Beautiful, no? Only problem is, this comb should have been crawling with bees! But there was barely a bee to be found, what gives? My only theory is that this hive swarmed twice and then for some reason they completely abandoned this space. They had been here at least a month ago, because I saw them swarm on that day. Between then and the day that we did this job, the bees decided to skedaddle. We did come across a handful of bees, but these were just some poor, lost stragglers. There was still a decent amount of honey in the hive, and there were some other friends dining on the delectable delight...

Wax Moth Larvae - Yum!

 

When a hive is uninhabited, it doesn't take long for wax moths to move in. In the photo above you can see the larvae that have infested the honey comb. They eat the honey, beeswax and pollen that is stored in the comb. They are basically the clean up crew for empty hives.  Normally the bees keep them at bay but once the bees are gone, the wax moths take over and completely destroy/clean up the comb.

Wax Moth Cocoons 

This is what the ceiling looked like. The first hole revealed nothing so we had to move the second hole over to the next joist space to find the hive. Sometimes locating the precise location of the hive is the toughest part of the job.

We cleaned out the ceiling cavity pretty well and wrapped up the job. Joel took the wax moth-laden comb to feed to his chickens, who I am sure very much appreciated the gesture!

Cleaned Out Ceiling Cavity

One Lonely Little Lady

So, two removal jobs and no bees to show for it (unless we count the two swarms from the Conshohocken hive, both of which are doing quite well so far). I did get some nice drawn comb from the Navy Yard bees, which I have already put into use in other hives. And I managed to salvage some other wax that I'll make into candles in the fall.  I'll write about the other 2 removal jobs in my next post...

A Busy Summer Part 2 - Swarms!

This is the continuation of my Summer of Fun post...

Honey bee swarms are a colony's way of reproducing and perpetuating their genetics. While there are multiple possible triggers for the swarming instinct, one of the major causes of swarming is overcrowded conditions in a hive. Preparations for swarming begin several weeks before the swarm actually happens.  Because the current queen of the colony will leave with the swarm, the workers must make a new queen in order to replace the queen that leaves. The workers will produce multiple queen cells and they will prohibit the current queen from killing off the developing queens in those cells. Additionally, the workers will stop feeding the current queen in order to get her to slim down for her flight with the swarm (she hasn't flown since her mating flight which may have been a year or more ago). The entire process of swarming is a finely tuned dance that shows us the incredible decision-making process that honey bees are capable of.

Around the time when the new queens hatch, the old queen and 50-65% of the workers leave the hive in a massive cloud of bees - they are leaving the parent colony behind and will search for a new home. They gorge on honey so that they have energy for the next few days, when they will not have access to food like they would in their old home. After leaving the hive, they gather in a large cluster on a tree limb or fencepost or some other convenient spot not too far from the original hive. While they are stationed at this temporary "home", they will send out scout bees to look for the best possible cavity to make their new home in. The decision of where to make their new home is another amazing example of democratic decision-making (Honeybee Democracy is a book about this process). Once they have decided on the place, the entire cluster will fly to the new spot and begin to make their new home. Now, if the beekeeper can get to the swarm while they are clustered at their temporary home (they may stay clustered like this for a few days), it is relatively easy to catch the entire swarm, queen and all, and place them in a hive. Because they don't really have a home to defend and they are honey-drunk, swarm bees are generally very docile (see this video here).

Meanwhile, back at the parent colony, the new queens are hatching and killing each other, its survival of the fittest. The most bad-ass queen wins! (Although sometimes a hive will "throw multiple swarms" and a few bad-ass queens can win.)

In general, if a swarm leaves from one of your hives and you don't catch it, you are a sad beekeeper - you just lost a bunch of bees and a lot of honey! But, if you catch a swarm from a wild hive or someone else's hive - FREE BEES!

Alright alright, on to the story of my swarm captures this summer...


The Bleacher Swarm
I got a call one afternoon about a swarm near a church on Cheltenham Avenue not too far off of Route 611. I packed my car, hopped in and drove to the scene. I arrived to see this, pretty freakin' cool...

Just hanging out!

View from below

I brought the bee-vac setup (without the vacuum) because its a good way to transport bees, it offers good ventilation and an easy setup once you get the bees to the apiary. It worked out really well. I basically put the box under the cluster and gently dislodged the cluster, they fell into the box.

Stragglers making their way into the box to be with queenie

A few bees with their butts sticking up in the air, spreading pheromones to let the others know the queen is in the house

This capture went super smoothly, very easy. I closed up the box and drove them home. I set this swarm up in a hive on my roof. They are doing great.


The Honda Swarm
This swarm call didn't go so smoothly because I was unprepared and rushed. I will let the pictures get the story rolling...

Swarm is near the ground under this bush

I clipped off the branch into this nuc box, about half of the bees went into the box

My first mistake was closing this box. You can see the bees gathering on it because the queen is inside with the other half of the bees. I closed it because I was in a rush and I didn't want the bees inside to fly away. I also think it was a mistake to use this box because it is screened, and therefore open to the light, on the top and the bottom. At this point I figured well OK, I will place this entire box into my large Rubbermaid container and I'll put it all in my trunk and drive home. Problem was that the nuc box didn't fit into my other container (and the Rubbermaid didn't fit into the trunk!). So I decided, my second mistake, to place this box on my passenger seat and drive home this way. The worst that could happen is that the bees on the outside of the box would fly around a bit, but at least I had the queen locked up in the box. Besides, I had to get back to work!

Well, you can see that the bees didn't stay in place!

Flying all over the place! I kept my protective gear on while driving

Rear window

What a sight I must have been! Driving down Kelly Drive with my veil on and 20,000 bees flying around my car! As I was driving I reminded myself that at least the queen was in the box and when I got to the apiary I could set her up in a hive and all of these loose bees will find her and move into the box with her and the rest of the bees. Don't know if you have guessed by now, but I was wrong again! It turns out the the nuc box wasn't closed tightly and the bees that had been in there were also out, the entire swarm was flying free in my car!! I didn't figure out that ALL of the bees were free until I got to my apiary.

I pulled my car into this little alley near my Francisville beeyard and proceeded to discover that the nuc box was now pretty much empty of bees. After a failed attempt at finding the queen and also trying to lure her into another box, I left my car parked in that alley with the doors open and all of the bees flying around and in my car. I had to go to work for a few hours and I figured I would come back and deal with it later. I came back with a vacuum to suck up the bees and I returned to my car and found a surprise! After vacuuming up a bunch of bees, something caught my eye...

Can you see the little beady bee eyes peaking out from behind my door handle?

Now you can see them! They moved INTO MY DOOR!

Another view

Yep, inside the speaker too!!

As an aside, while I was home gathering my vacuum and equipment there's a knock on my front door. Its a policeman -

Cop: "Are you Adam Schreiber?"

Me: "Yes, that's me."

Cop: "Do you know your car is sitting on Field St with its doors open?"

Me: "Yep, I know, with a bunch of bees flying around in it!"

Cop: "Oh, OK, we just wanted to make sure it wasn't stolen or something."

He didn't really care about the bees! I was impressed with how quickly they responded to the "problem". Actually this wasn't the only police involvement in the story, but I'll get to that in a minute.

So anyway, I vacuumed what I thought was the majority of the bees and drove the car back to my street so I could deal with the rest the next day. I left the bees in the car overnight, put a box in the car with honey, thinking they might migrate into the box. No such luck - in the morning I saw that none of the bees had taken the honey bait, they were still all in the door peering out at me! I would vacuum them in dribs and drabs as they would come out to investigate. It was a slow process. I tried banging on the door to get them to come out, which only helped a bit. At this point I am thinking that I might have to remove my entire door panel to get to them.

Then Eureka! - for once in this whole ordeal, I had a good idea! I lit a smoker and proceeded to puff smoke into the door through whatever tiny holes I could find. Aside from having my car smell like a campfire for weeks, this worked well, the bees came pouring out to escape the smoke. As they left the safety of the door, I'd suck them into the vacuum. I even saw the queen pop out a few times and I tried to grab her, unsuccessfully. Here's a good view of how things looked...

No big deal, so there are some bees in our car.

Daddy is crazy!

Oh yeah, I almost forgot police involvement #2. I am in front of the house sucking up bees - wearing a veil, vacuum screaming, smoker smoking - when a cop comes up to me. Obviously he can see I am dealing with a "situation", but he is nonplussed. He has come to tell me that I need to move my car forward because it is impinging upon the handicapped space next to my house! I swear, the car was no more than 2 feet into the spot, which is more than big enough to fit a car anyway. My neighbor called the cops on me and this officer didn't care what I was dealing with, he said, with bees buzzing around his noggin, "Just move the car up." So of course, being the law-abiding citizen that I am, I moved it and then renewed my efforts at extracting the rest of the bees.

Once I finally had removed all of the bees, I saw that they had started building honeycomb inside my door! Incredible! Somehow they thought they were going to set up house in my car! Anyway, a significant number of bees died throughout this whole fiasco, but within a month's time, this hive was back on track and they have done nicely at their new home in Fairmount Park.

I don't have any pictures from my third swarm, but suffice it to say that with the timely help of fellow beekeeper Daniel Duffy and a maintenance man with a big ladder, things went very well. That third swarm has also built up nicely this summer. Even though one never knows where swarms come from, it is great fun to catch them and also nice to add genetic diversity to your beeyards. There is always a chance that the bees are from feral, survivor stock and this is something that every beekeeper wants. Some beekeepers worry about picking up diseases from swarms but I ain't worried and besides, if I didn't capture swarms I wouldn't have such great stories to tell!

Get Outta My Bedroom!

Earlier this summer I got a call about some bees living in a house in Southwest Philadelphia.  I went to check out the situation and what I saw was hundreds of dead bees (and some live ones) in what used to be a 6 year-old's bedroom (he hadn't stayed in his room for 6 months because of the bees).  There was even honey dripping through the ceiling and landing in a honey puddle on the floor.  The bees were entering the house through the flashing of the exterior roof and they had made their home in the ceiling of the bedroom.  As far as we could tell, the bees had been there for at least one-and-a-half years.  In order to remove the bees we'd have to rip open the ceiling, cut out all of the honeycomb and get all of the bees out of there.

More hands make easier work so I enlisted the help of world famous president of The Philadelphia Beekeepers Guild, Joel Eckel.  We had a great time and everything went amazingly smooth.  The first order of business was to locate the hive exactly and determine how big it was, which meant opening up the ceiling (remember you can click on images to enlarge them).

Believe it or not, the bees were pretty damn calm, especially given that we were completely destroying their home.  After getting an idea of how large the hive was and where its boundaries were, we began gathering the bees.  The easiest and best way to do that is with a vacuum - yes, a bee vacuum.  There are many different variations of the bee-vac out there, but the one I purchased is basically like a wooden hive body that gets hooked up to a shop vac.  The bees get sucked into the hive body and theoretically hang out in there until you take them to their new home (later you'll see why I say "theoretically") .  Unfortunately I didn't get a good picture of the bee vac but here's a little demo:

That huge chunk of honeycomb that you see in the beginning on top of the bucket was packed with a few pounds of honey.  After vacuuming a big bunch of bees, Joel began cutting the comb off of the ceiling and the walls.  If the comb was filled with honey, we put it in a bucket to deal with later.  We harvested about 40 pounds of honey from this hive, most of which will be fed back to these bees or to my other bees if they need it.  If the comb was filled with brood, we tried to preserve it by rubberbanding it into frames so that it could be placed into a hive body.  Here's how that went:

So we would vacuum some bees, cut out some comb and repeat.  It took us about 4 hours in total.  That included some help from the owners of the building, Alex (video below) and Chris (pic below).  They really got into it and were amazed by the bees and the process of removing them.

Once we cut out all of the comb and vacuumed as many bees as possible, we cleaned up and left.  We knew that many of the forager bees were out foraging and would return later in the day.  So I returned to the house after dusk and there were a few more softball-sized clusters of bees hanging out near the window.  I did one last vacuum job and then packed up for home.  After my traumatic swarm incident, I wanted to get these bees set up in a new hive ASAP.  I brought the hive body with the rubberbanded brood frames and I put it on my roof, where this hive would live for the time beeing.

I went to dump the bees out from the vacuum box into the new hive and was shocked and dismayed  to see that once again, a lot of the bees were dead.

So, bee carnage part 2?  Well, it wasn't quite as bad this time.  It seemed like there were enough living bees that this hive might have a fighting chance to re-establish itself.  But, in retrospect I do think that the bee vacuum box was just way too small and there were too many bees in there and it was too hot. Nonetheless, in the days following the relocation, the bees seemed to be adjusting to their new home.

Much to my delight, when I checked on the bees earlier this week, they had made some queen cells in an effort to replace their deceased queen.  They had also begun to secure the comb into the frames.  You can see a video of me checking on this hive and an excellent article on urban beekeeping right here.  I am also feeding their honey back to them.

The chances that this hive will make it through the winter are still slim - mainly because their population was so decimated and they will lose a few weeks of growth due to the fact that they needed to make a queen from one of the existing larvae.  But, you never know and worst case scenario is that I have 40 pounds of surplus, chemical-free honey to feed my other bees AND most importantly, the little boy who lost his bedroom to the bees can now have it back!

Bees in My Britches

Queen bee survived the night in her cage and then I installed her in the hive at The Spring Gardens yesterday. All in all things went smoothly with a couple of small bumps on the way. Following the instructions of the bee supplier, the first order of business was to find and then destroy any queen cells that these workers had made in an effort to make themselves a new queen. When I installed the bees in this hive - 5 days prior - there weren't any queen cells at all, so it would be interesting to see how many there were - if any.

I had to go though each frame and look closely - if I missed any queen cells, there is a good chance that the bees would kill the queen that I was about to re-introduce to them. I could have just let the bees raise their own, new queen, but the hive would have lost a lot of population and time in that process. Well, there were plenty of queen cells - the bees had been busy. I found at least a dozen.

Here are some examples of what a queen cell looks like - the big droopy cell in the middle is a capped queen cell (just a reminder - ya gotta enlarge these shots - click on them - very cool!) -



A few more queen cells - there are 3 in this photo -




The one here is an uncapped queen cell - it is not as far along in its development as the capped cells. Look closely in the cup and you can see the larvae in the cell - when it gets to a certain stage of development, the bees will cap the cell and the queen will start to change into a pupa -



Exploded view - after I opened the queen cell. The white liquid surrounding the larvae is "bee milk". Also in this photo, you can see worker larvae (towards the bottom right corner) and directly above that, the little pea-shaped capped cell is a drone brood cell (drones are much bigger than workers, so their cells are bigger too) -



One more view (this was one of the most developed queen larvae) -


The bees were very calm in general - which is pretty amazing given what I was doing to their hive. I was in the hive for a good 20 minutes. There were a lot of bees flying around me because I had to brush them off the frames in order to find all of the queen cells.

So, I'm going about my business when, at one point I felt a tickling sensation on my chest - I thought, hmm kinda feels like a bee in there (I was wearing 2 long sleeved shirts and my veil). I remember thinking to myself "Stay calm" and somehow I did. I walked a few feet from the hive and pulled my shirt up - there she was, a bee crawling around on my hairy chest! That kind of got my adrenaline up a little!! But, not as high as it would go a few minutes later...

After shooing the bee out of my shirt, I went back to work. About 5 minutes later, I felt another tickling - this time, on my upper thigh - way too close to my crotch!! I thought I was just beeing paranoid after the first incident - but I was not about to take my chances on this one. So once again, I stepped away from the hive, dropped trou, and lo and behold - there was a bee crawling around on my skivvies!! Yikes!! I quickly flicked her off, checked for friends, then closed up my pants!! Now my heart was pumping pretty good! I didn't really believe it when I heard that bees like to crawl up pants - but now, call me a Believer!

Somehow I managed to finish what I needed to do - which was to destroy the queen cells and then install the new queen cage. The bees in the hive will release the queen over the course of a few days by eating the candy filling and opening a hole in the queen cage. Amazingly, I got no stings (praise the lord!). I got in my car, pushed in the clutch and my leg was shaking from being so amped up!!

But, really, I am having fun!!