Strange Removals Part II

I know you have been waiting with bated breath, so here is the rest of the story of my Summer of Strange Removals. After the Conshohocken job, the next bee removal job was in Northeast Philly at Disston Precision, a company that dates back to 1850 and is still functioning as a manufacturer of custom steel supplies, including saw blades. The bees were living in a window cavity, where the window had been removed and the space boarded up. 

View From Outside

View From Inside

We felt that this would be a fairly straightforward job - we'd just remove the large piece of plywood on the inside of the window, expose the hive and remove the bees and comb. And this is pretty much how things went. Although, when we opened the cavity, once again we saw very few bees in the hive. But have a look at these huge, gorgeous sheets of comb.

View from the bottom of the comb

We gradually removed sheet after sheet of comb and while we were seeing some bees, we were only seeing honey comb and no signs of any brood.

We got through the entire hive and there was absolutely no brood at all. No eggs, larvae or capped brood, no queen either.  With no brood comb to worry about and not too many bees, this was a quick and easy job. Because there were some bees in the hive, still working and gathering nectar, the honey was clean and there were no wax moths like there were at the job in Conshohocken. Joel saved the honey to use for making mead. We vacuumed up the bees that were there and Joel just set them free near his hives so they could join another colony.

So for the third time this summer, there were basically no new bees to add to my apiaries. Because there was no queen and no brood, the genetics of this hive would not be passed on and couldn't be preserved. My guess about this hive is that they swarmed some time in the early summer and were unsuccessful at making a new queen. They probably tried to make a new queen but if the new queen somehow got damaged or killed (eaten by a bird on her mating flight?) and there were no more eggs left in the hive, this hive would eventually die out because they wouldn't be able to make a new queen. Once all of the brood were hatched and there were no more young to care for, the remaining bees are left only to gather bunches and bunches of nectar and turn it into honey. And that's what they do, because that's what they know how to do!

Sometimes in this queenless situation, you will get what is called a "laying worker". This is when, in the absence of a viable queen and with no resources to make a new queen, one or more worker bees start to lay eggs. Problem is that the workers can only lay unfertilized eggs, which become male bees or drones. This is a last ditch effort to try to perpetuate the genetics of the hive, hoping that one of the drones will be able to mate with a queen somewhere and thus carry on the genes. There is a possible exception to this hopeless drone-laying worker situation called "thelytoky". Thelytoky is when a female is produced from an unfertilized egg. If the laying workers can create females bees, then the colony would be able to make a new queen with one of the female eggs that the laying worker lays. Confused yet? Dee Lusby, of Organic Beekeepers Yahoo Group fame, regularly insists that thelytoky is not as rare in honey bees as some would lead us to believe.

Ok, sorry for the biology lesson digression - back to the removal jobs. The final job of the summer was in West Philadelphia at a beautiful old Dominican Convent that is now an apartment building. The bees were entering the house through a third floor dormer and lots of bees were getting into other parts of the house via the attic and ductwork. The bees apparently had been there for several years and the owner had them sprayed earlier this summer. An unscrupulous exterminator told the homeowner that these were not honey bees so that he could spray them and make some money off of the job. Boo!!

Here we are getting things set up. The bees were entering the house near the little window to the left of the vacuum set-up. Little did we realize at this point that once again, we would not be needing the bee vac!

Finding the hive in the walls was challenging as the exterior and interior of the building were a mess of angles and weird compartments. We made a few holes in the walls and didn't find anything until our fourth attempt, the one that Jeff is working on in the picture below. 

 Here is what the inside of the wall looked like. But notice, once again, NO BEES!

Looking down into the cavity, some big sheets of comb...

There were a few bees coming and going, but we quickly realized that these were robber bees from another hive stealing the honey and that there were actually no bees living in this hive. One way to tell that the hive was being robbed was that the comb was all chewed up and raggedy with lots of capping wax on the floor.

As we proceeded to remove comb. At first all we were seeing was new, white honey comb and no brood comb. After we removed most of the honey comb, we saw that the comb kind of went around the corner down towards the bottom of the picture above. The rest of the hive ended up being under the little window. Here we found more honey and the dark brood comb and a bunch of wax moths, but still no bees, dead or alive.

We also soon realized that the few robber bees that were coming inside were quickly dying. It is normal for the bees to gather at a window during a removal job, going toward the light to try to get outside. But it is not normal for them to die within minutes. We figured that whatever had been sprayed in this hive was still killing the bees as they stole the honey. The bees that had been living here must have absconded once the insecticide was sprayed because there was no huge pile of dead bees inside the hive as one might expect when a hive is poisoned.

Poor dying bees on the window

Here is a big ol' bag of contaminated honey and comb, it weighed at least 40 pounds. Because it had been sprayed, neither of us wanted anything to do with this mess so we trashed it all.

At the end of the day and for the 4th time this summer, I did a removal job and didn't have any bees to show for it. But the summer wasn't a total loss - it is always great to see the feral hives and how the bees organize things. And all of the homeowners were happy to have the hives and comb out of their walls. And I also made a few bucks to help support this addictive hobby of mine. My next post will be about the Treatment Free Beekeeping Conference that I attended in Leominster, MA a few weeks ago.

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...