Viewer mail: Whiskey bees

Chris W in Eastern Oregon writes:

I have been on the swarm list for my area and have had about 10 different calls to come and remove these scarry bees. Most turned out to be yellow jackets and wasps... not interested in them buggers.

I have been reading your site for a few days and you have done what I was looking for. Let the bees bee. I don't need no stinking chemicals near what my family (bees included) may eat. No thanks, have you read some of the stuff they put in there.

Anyhow my reason for writing was I thought you might enjoy one of my hive removal stories. I was called to save a swarm in down town Hermiston. My dad and I arrived to find "The Swarm" was inside of an old whiskey barrel. So dad and I picked it up and took it to my yard. We were trying to figure out how to get the bees out and put them in a Lang. One day I went to check on them, and before I got to the barrel I noticed something not right. I looked over and saw a swarm cluster under one of my trees. Came right from the barrel and hung out.

A couple days later dad brought a new saw with him that just viberates, and has a very small kerf. I cut all around that barrel in about 5 minutes. This is what we saw.

As of today they are doing great in their new home.

Thanks for all your work...

—Chris

Viewer mail: Swarm rescue with heavy equipment

A reader in Michigan writes:

I know that we are a long way from LA, but I have a story to tell that would not have happened without your blog. In the fall of 2010, we began investigating beekeeping. Your blog was one of the first I followed. I borrowed books from the library, my husband watched all the videos he could find.

In the winter of 2011, we ordered two packages of bees and beekeeping supplies. We felt that our chances of happening upon a wild swarm in west central Michigan were slim and we certainly weren't ready to open ourselves to removal of bees—we hadn't even kept bees.

Fast forward to this winter. We decided to order two more packages, one for my husband's mother and one for us in case we ended up with an empty hive. We checked on them went it warmed up and discovered we had two full hives survive a rather mild winter this year. We ordered more supplies so we would be ready, added more hive body pieces to our existing hives and were happily awaiting the arrival of our new bees.

Uri's first solo bee rescue

Uri and Laura.

LA Backwards Beekeeper Uri writes:

I just completed my first independent bee rescue on Monday. I should start by saying that I attended my first Backwards Beekeepers meeting about a year ago and have been keeping bees for almost a year now, and helped Roberta with a bee rescue in Long Beach last summer. So, it's been a lot of learning but I finally felt ready to do it on my own.

This particular colony had taken up residence under a Tuff Shed in Laura’s Costa Mesa backyard.

Laura’s yard was a wonderful place to work. She is a teacher at a Waldorf school and the yard reflected that. There was an array of fruit trees, an organic garden, and a tree house (Laura said her fruit production had increased dramatically since the bees took up residence). Also, she makes hand-crafted beeswax candles and she gave me one in appreciation for rescuing her bees! Thank you Laura.

The bees had to be removed because one of Laura’s sons got stung and found out he was very allergic. I was happy that she decided to have her bees rescued instead of destroyed.

The bees had dug an entrance through the dirt under the metal base of the shed. The only way to relocate them was to cut out part of the floor inside the shed and remove the bees from there.

I smoked the bees a bit while preparing my equipment. I then sawed a rectangle through the 1-inch wood flooring and removed that panel which had much comb (and bees!) hanging from it. They were quite a friendly colony and didn’t give any problems whatsoever.

Settling bees...and neighbors

Pasadena Backwards Beekeeper Deborah writes:

Re-stacked my hive that was upended in the Dec. 1st winds here in Pasadena. Wasn't sure what the end result would be with so many dead bees on the roof from the cold, but the hive is now thriving!

Just did my first honey harvest ever. Very first jar went to my next door neighbor who was stung in the face four times the day after the hive got tumbled. They have since settled down....(neighbors and bees!)

—Deborah

Barbara's Long Beach bee rescue

Ed faces the beehive.

LA Backwards Beekeeper Barbara led a bee rescue at Rosie the Riveter Park in Long Beach. She writes:

It was one of those hives you wish you could just leave alone—comb woven so beautifully through the branches of the tree, its length impressive given its position out at the end of some very tiny branches. It looked impossibly heavy. Somehow it had survived the Santa Ana winds of the night before. I worried that evening that our rescue the next morning at dawn might come too late but when Craig and I arrived at 6:30 a.m. it was still firmly attached, covered in bees and was providing breakfast for a hummingbird. I wish we had gotten a picture of that.

Ed from Long Beach Department of Parks and Recreation had contacted Roberta to see if we could help out with this hive. The City has been very open to the idea of relocating rather than exterminating hives in the city’s parks so we really wanted this to go well. It could only be done on a weekday, so Roberta would not be available. I would need some help. I put out the call for some muscle and Rich, who has helped out before, said he was available and needed bees to bolster his weaker hive. We were set...or so we thought.

The night before the scheduled rescue, Rich injured his back and was not going to be able to lift or bend. There went the muscle. Rich brought his wife Sheleana and I brought Craig, who had helped me with pickups a time or two. Unfortunately we only had one extra veil borrowed from Roberta, so Craig was relegated to taking videos from a distance and being chased around the park by guard bees. He did both very well!

Ed had brought a one-person bucket truck which he was required to operate himself for liability reasons, so with no rescue experience he had to smoke, prune, vacuum, cut comb and bring it all down to Rich and me; we framed it and emptied the bee-filled vacuum into Rich’s boxes.

The top third of the hive had been drawn all through the little branches and had to be brought down as one piece. We estimated its weight at between 15 and 20 pounds. It was absolutely beautiful.

One interesting aspect was that several iridescent green fig beetles had been entrapped and looked like jewels below the surface. Rather than create a huge mess trying to remove the honeycomb from the mass we left it intact. Rich added a third box to enclose it so the bees could deal with it as they saw fit this winter.

It was a smooth team effort with no mishaps and amazingly for Craig, no stings. I’m sure Ed will ask for BBK help again.

—Barbara

UPDATE: Barbara sent some great video clips from the rescue.

Backwards Beekeepers to the rescue at the LA Zoo

Now that's a big hive.

LA Backwards Beekeeper Roberta writes:

Ceebs answered a call to the Bee Rescue Hotline about some hives at the LA Zoo. Dave, who is in charge of the grounds, wanted to do some natural extractions rather than use exterminators. Ceebs did some recognizance and started the wheels rolling.

The zoo rescue crew.

We had a huge group of people go there to remove a VERY big hive (as big as me!). It was under an elevated platform for an old aviary that was set to be demolished the following week, so we were in a time crunch. Luckily we had a team of both pros and newbees willing to meet at 6am to take care of it. We had Kirk, Randy, Chris, Ceebs, myself, Chandra, Barbara, Ryan and James.

Kirk at work.

We started out by just trying to figure out what to do. It took a ladder and a set of containers lifted with a pulley system. There was a bunch of chaos after the first few cuts and then Kirk went in and just took it apart in big whacks.

In no time the comb had come down, the brood was tied in and the honeycomb stashed away. Chandra, one of the condor keepers, took the bees home for her first hive.

On another recent visit Randy, Joseph, Ed, Andrew, James, Margarita and Barbara tackled a few hives. Two were under trailers and were pretty big and old. Access was difficult because it required lying on the ground. These cutouts went pretty fast. Then there was a hive in a tree that required a chainsaw but was too deep to extract so will require another trip for a trap-out.

—roberta

Backwards Beekeeper Ed adds:

Here's a joke for you. An Irishman, a Croatian, and a Guatemalan meet at the zoo and...

Joseph, Ed, Andrew.

Oh wait a minute, it's not a joke, its actually the Backwards Beekeepers International Section. Andrew, Joseph and I had the pleasure of doing a great cutout this AM at the Condor Sanctuary. It was a very mature hive located underneath a trailer. I'd say it was a couple of years old.

We did not use a bee vac. All we did was smoke and cut. We spotted the queen and manually placed her in Joseph's supers, collected plenty of honey and were headed for home by 9:30 AM. I don't believe anyone was stung even a single time.

I will post the photos (courtesy of Margarita) on the LA BeeRescue site.

—Ed

Victoria's bees move out of the house, into a hive

No drones allowed, I guess. (click to enlarge)

LA Backwards Beekeeper Roberta writes:

Victoria is a wonderful fellow Long Beach beekeeper. She started out by wanting to host a hive, and posted an offer to do so on the Backwards Beekeepers Yahoo group.

She quickly got a call from a couple who had made a beautiful and uniquely painted top bar hive (see above). They brought it over with a swarm which had already set up housekeeping inside.

Henry in Long Beach helped Victoria with her first inspection, which was a bit tricky. The homemade frames were a little difficult to move around and some of the combs were attached to top bars. Henry put in a deep frame and it kind of fit.

Well, Victoria loved how it was decorated but in the long run wanted to have an easier-to-manage Langstroth hive. So I went over and in a couple of stages we cut out the combs and moved them to a new hive. The bees were just a little bothered by it and then went right back to working.

Victoria and Barbara.

Barbara came on the second visit, which made things go a lot faster. There was a little honey comb that Victoria's hubbie and daughter got to sample. Victoria's daughter wants her own beekeeping veil, which she'’ll get soon.

—roberta

Trap-out and hive transfer

Barrett showing off some very productive bees.

LA Backwards Beekeeper Roberta writes:

I went over to Barrett's place before the recent Backwards Beekeeping meeting to work on some projects we've set up.

The first project that Barrett, his neighbor Dave, and I worked on were some bees in the base of the sycamore tree. The bees had been in the tree for about 2 years. After a month of trapping them out, it seemed like all the bees were out and now we wanted to see what was left in the hive.

We found empty comb and no bees which means that the trap-out worked. Then we filled the hive with dirt and cemented the area to discourage bees from coming back. Check out the video for the quick version of the process:

The next project was a hive transfer of a swarm that we put in a deep box about 2 weeks ago. They built comb like crazy. Check out the video to see the beautiful hive they had built:

We cut the beautiful brood comb out and tied them into deep frames. It was an almost perfect fit. Dave spotted the queen with his eagle eye and boy was she huge. She must have been over an inch long! We couldn't catch a picture in time though.

I needed to leave for the meeting but next projects are adding the trapped-out bees to the hive that we transferred and then fix another hive that also suffered from not having all the right equipment at the same time. Medium frames in a deep box—I can only say that I work with what I find in my car.

Barrett has offered to thank the Backwards Beekeepers for the help by hosting a tour of his hives and a satellite meeting on the West side. Look out for details on our Yahoo group page.

—roberta

Huge tangerine tree hive

LA Backwards Beekeeper Roberta writes:

Last night Rob and I went to check out a tangerine tree hive in Culver City. The hive was a substantial size, described as two basketballs, and the estimate was pretty close—big for a tree hive. It was also pretty high up, about 10 feet.

I shot a few pictures and was trying to figure out when to remove it. Rob just said he would do it that day. He's got a bad case of bee fever! Well, how could I say no?

I called Yvonne who came to lend a hand and Rob started cutting branches away. That took at least an hour and we removed several 8-foot branches to create a path for the hive to some down. We smoked the hive, but the bees were still a little mad about it all.

Since it was night, we could get just about all the bees. By some miracle Rob was able to carry the huge branch down and then Yvonne held it while we trimmed branches to make it fit into the cardboard box. It was a team effort, but Rob did all the hard work.

Rob and Yvonne.

Cutting the hive apart to put it in a box is going to be pretty hard because there are branches stuck all throughout the comb. It's really beautiful. I wish it could have stayed up in the branches, but it was spectacular to see up close.

—roberta

Rob follows up on the story:

I looked at the bees this morning, and the ants had already found the box. I decided to go ahead and do the cut out this morning. It could not have gone better. The bees were totally honey drunk, as they had gulped virtually every drop of honey. The hive was almost entirely brood, with very little drone comb.

Rather than try another top bar, I tied the comb into some frames for my large super. Total piece of cake comparatively. The problem though is I only had 5 frames. I ordered a bunch but they are still somewhere between here and Brushy Mountain; LA Honey Supply Co. didn't have frames after I drove all the way out there (seriously…?).

This is so much fun Roberta. You said it…I got one heck of a case of bee fever. Maybe I'm under the control of queen pheromones ;)

I'm not sure where these bees are going right now, but I'm sure to find a nice home. In the meantime, they can call my place home.

Thanks again Roberta, you are seriously the best. Total pleasure working with you.

Cheers,

Rob

Roberta finds a tough trap-out and makes a new beekeeper

LA Backwards Beekeeper Roberta writes:

Kirk put me in contact with Barrett, who had bees in the base of a Sycamore tree. The bees had been there at least a year. A bee company had come to fill up the opening with a spray foam, but that didn't work. Now it was time to try something new and better, so we met planned a 6am trap out. Luckily Barrett found out that his neighbor, David, had just set-up a new hive a couple of weeks ago and he was interested in helping despite the crazy hour.

We nailed in the screen with a small hole in the middle of a cone shape that would help funnel the bees out of the trap out screen. We tacked down the screen to the ground with garden staples and then buried it in dirt. It looked great but it didn't last very long, as some creature found it the next day and dug up the dirt and closed the hole. We fixed it the next weekend but then those sneaky bees found a way out the back of the tree!

We'll throw some dirt where they are coming out and hope for the best. The trap-out will take a while but in the meantime...

A swarm capture, a cut-out, and making new beekeepers

LA Backwards Beekeeper Roberta writes:

We heard from Renata in Venice (pictured above), who caught a swarm on video as it entered a small ventilation hole in her exterior wall April 1st. She investigated different live removals but her landlord wanted to close the hole rather than pay to have them rescued. Luckily she found us and the Bee Rescue Hotline.

A week ago we set up a trap-out with a wire screen duct-taped to the wall and a cardboard box duct taped to a pipe above the hole.

After setting it up I got home and checked my email and the first one read: "The Box Fell!"

Ughhh! I went right back and we set up her patio table and an ironing table with a tomato cage positioned to keep the box from blowing over. It looked crazy, but prevented having to drill a couple more holes in the wall to set up a bracket.

That's some serious crazy.

I checked it a week later and they looked like they had all moved into the box. I'm going to leave it for a couple more weeks just to make sure. Then the bees will go to Rob, Renata's co-worker, who has already ordered hive boxes and his protective gear.

Rob and I had planned on checking the trap out together, but then a swarm call came in just a few minutes from his place: bees had moved into a water meter in Mar Vista. We couldn't pass that up.

Outside the water meter.

We checked it out and the hive was still small with 3 new combs and the bees had a wonderful temperament. We transferred them to a cardboard box and left another box to catch the foragers. Rob went back at night and was able to get all of them.

Inside the water meter.

The best part was that many of the neighbors stopped, asked questions and were very supportive. It wasn't just a bee rescue, but more of a public service announcement. Even the neighbors across the street had us come over to get a beekeeping consultation.

Rob and his bees.

As soon as we left, those same neighbors posted on our Yahoo group that they want to host a hive. Now Renata's bees are safe, Rob has a new colony and we have a new prospective bee home!

—roberta

An epic quest for bees

Meet Grove, a man on a mission for bees.


LA Backwards Beekeeper Roberta writes:

Grove has a perfect location for bees right by the LA River. He has chickens and a beautiful garden. For the ultimate garden addition, he wanted a beehive.

Grove had visited two other Backwards Beekeepers and wanted to get started as soon as possible. He got his protective gear from his brother who and once been a beekeeper.

The first attempt to get bees was when Sam, another astute Backwards Beekeeper, spotted a swarm in a Home Depot tree. But LA Backwards Beekeepers Max and Steve took care of this one.

A day later, however, Sam saw that there was still a grapefruit sized ball of bees in the Home Depot tree. Seemed not quite worth it since I had already rescued Veronica's swarm from Norwalk and planned to bring it to Grove. I scheduled to do a 6am drop off of The Norwalk swarm for Grove, but when I went to my car at 5am, someone had stolen the box of bees that had been sitting on the car roof! Pure craziness! Who, the heck steals a box of bees in the middle of the night !?! I stood by the car for a few minutes in shock and with a lot of concern for the poor bees who were in some criminal's possession....

Anyways I thought, I'll go get those darn straggler Home Depot bees.

Swarm rescue at Home Depot

LA Backwards Beekeeper Max writes on her blog:

...our neighbor Noel knocked on our door.

Noel had just come from Home Depot where he’d spotted a swarm of bees in a tree in the parking lot. We jumped in the car and drove down to Home Depot, hoping the bees hadn’t already moved…or been sprayed down with some toxic chemical.

We found the football-sized swarm in the tree as described. I hope these bees are handy and can fix stuff around the house. It will be a drag if this swarm just stopped by Home Depot to shop for ugly ceiling fans.

We borrowed a step ladder from the store (so handy) and were just plotting the best method of shaking the bees into our cardboard box, when another neighbor, Evan, happened to walk by with his contractor. He nicely volunteered to take photos of us so we could both be in the pictures.

Home Depot Swarm Capture (My Roman Apartment)

Roberta's Highland Park heroes

LA Backwards Beekeeper Roberta writes:

I got a sad call from my hive's host yesterday. The Ag department came to check the hives and said that they needed to be moved. I would only have a few days so I needed help fast. I knew that Warren was helping Shannon, Eric and their children host bees and become beekeepers so I called him right away. He immediately said he would help, my first hero.

We've both had sketchy hive move experiences so we did a lot of planning to make this happen right. We would need moving screens (thanks Ceebs!!), wooden planks to screw the boxes together, ratchet straps and some muscle. At the last moment Warren smartly thought we should ask for more help because these are 4 boxes hive and at the bottom of a hill.

I immediately thought of Tom and Ryan and I emailed them a few hours before the planned move at 7pm thinking that it wasn't fair to ask for such a big favor like this. Well, Tom called and said he was up for it and would meet us there, my second hero. Then as I started walking to the hives located at the bottom of a small hill I saw someone laying down by the hives in the dark and waving. It was Ryan already waiting by the hives! I can honestly say that my heart leapt, my third hero!!! He was very calm and confident that everything would go smoothly. I really needed that.

These beekeepers pack chainsaws

LA Backwards Beekeeper Roberta writes:

Mary from Chatsworth called the Bee Rescue Hotline about a two-year-old hive in a tree. The city came by and cut the tree down but the hive remained safely in the stump. There was a hole in the center of the stump but we couldn't see the hive.

It was the perfect scenario to use the new Bee Removal signs that Ceebs made. I love these signs. We put them up all along the sidewalk.

I brought an electric chainsaw but this stump was stubborn. Luckily we had half of the team from the Pierce College cutout. At one point, we had two electric chainsaws going and then a neighbor brought over his bigger gas chainsaw which was really powerful but still not enough.

The homeowner tried to move the stump with a chain strung through the stump and attached to the hitch of his huge truck, but it didn't budge. Then a couple of crow bars and a couple of car jacks were brought out to break apart the stump. Finally the stump gave up and exposed the hive which was in a part of the roots.

No swarm is out of reach

Rod lives just south of USC, and Kirk has been trapping bees out of the walls of his building for about a year now. A couple of days ago one the the hives swarmed to a nearby tree.

Kirk wanted to catch the swarm and get it to a new beekeeper, but the tree was difficult to reach and it's not like you can just ask a swarm to move to a more convenient location.


But if you know Kirk, you know he's the king of improvisation. He attached a nuc box to a painter's pole, and that swarm was on its way to a new home in Eagle Rock.

Roberta engineers an unusual trap-out

Bees at their entrance in the base of a tree.

LA Backwards Beekeeper Roberta writes about a crafty sort of trap-out:

The Bee Rescue Hotline got a call this week from Mary in Sherman Oaks. She has a hive of very docile bees in the base of her front yard tree. They've been there for 4 years but now a fence near the hive needs to be replaced. There isn't time for a trap out with bees flying everywhere while the construction crew is around. So I'm trying a trap out with the bees trapped between the tree and the hive box.

I heard about this technique from Ginger, and to be honest I didn't think it would work. But in a couple of weeks the bees she was trapping out had migrated to the box. Mary thought it was worth a try so we set it up tonight.

The great part is that Mary's daughter, Lulu, really wants to keep the bees and her mom loves the idea.

We checked out the bees during the evening. They were all in the tree with a cluster of tiny bees at the small entrance. It looks like they have built a wall of propolis at the entrance. There was a soft buzz coming from the tree and the aroma of warm honey wafted up from the entrance.

We didn't need any protection and Mary was a natural with the bees. We nailed the screen tunnel over the entrance and they were not happy with the pounding. They moved back and forth in the screen tunnel and into the hive box.

After a few minutes they calmed down and went back into the tree. We'll see how things go and see if the set-up is bee tight. Once the fence is finished next week, we'll move the bees to the backyard.

Hope this works.

- roberta

Cut-out for a new beekeeper

Tom, a new Backwards Beekeeper here in Los Angeles, sends this story from a cut-out he did with the indefatigable Roberta a few weeks ago:

So I got an email from Roberta letting me know that she has a line on some bees and asking me if I want in. Now I had a newly installed, yet vacant, hive sitting in backyard, just waiting for a deserving colony of bees.

So of course I said yes.

Obtaining the bees would require performing a cut-out of a previous trap-out Roberta had done back in October.

She told me these particular bees were an angry bunch, which gave me some cause for concern (a man with two daughters doesn't really want a hive of overly angry bees in his backyard), and then she started talking about axes and chainsaws, which gave me a little more concern.

What was I getting into here?

In the end, though, unable to resist the allure of a new colony, I decided to give it a shot.

So early one Saturday morning I pulled up in front of a house in Granada Hills. The first thing I noticed was that where there was once a tree, there was now only a stump.

At this point, the prepared beekeeper would have started to gently smoke the bees. However, I did not fit into this category, the smoker being the one (main) item I had yet to purchase. So I donned my trusty beekeeper veil, peered into the hive to see what we were in for, and waited.

When Roberta arrived we set to work cutting the comb out of the remains of the tree and trimming it to fit the frames. The colony had a fair amount of brood and a little bit of honey. Because the stump was open, the whole process went pretty quickly.

I did manage to spot the queen as as transferred the comb to my hive box.

Now, even though these bees weren't as grumpy as before, we still set the queen aside with a small retinue (just in case some regicide would be needed) as we finished transferring the comb, wrapped the hive box in a sheet, and loaded it into the car.

We didn't have a good way to gather up the loose bees that remained in the stump, so we did leave a small population of workers behind.

But I now had a small colony of bees for my backyard, with about six frames of comb. And later that night after discussing the queen's fate with Roberta, I decided that because the colony was so small, removing her from the throne wasn't really a good idea, so I reintroduced the queen to the hive. She seemed pretty happy about it.

Because of the colony's low supply of honey, I started out feeding them a supply of sugar water and pollen. They took to it pretty quickly, and the workers keep pretty busy flying in and out of the hive. At least they did until last week--the colony is still pretty small, and I'm slightly concerned about their chances after this past week of rain and low temperatures.

—Tom