Providence Saved
Billy got a call from the same school folks we worked with a couple of years ago at the Lincoln School. This call was for bees in a fairly new school in an upscale community west of Huntsville called Providence. The name of the school is also Providence and even though it is a new school, it is already over-crowded and requires expansion. When the contractor visited the location a few days ago to plan for the beginning of the expansion construction, he noticed a lot of bees coming and going at the very top of the second floor. He said his workers could not handle that and so the bees had to go before he could start his work. Hence the call to us.
We are in midst of making splits of our colonies and raising queens besides putting on honey supers and all the rest that goes with that. So it's a really busy time for us now. Nevertheless, Billy went to see what we could do to resolve this problem while I stayed at the bee yard and worked. Just before lunch he called me and asked me to gather up the stuff required to remove the bees and place them in a hive and bring it over to the school. He was able to determine that the bees had built a nest behind the brickwork and had expanded their colony along the brickwork (thankfully) instead of into the building. So it would be a simple matter of vacuuming the bees out, then removing the comb and putting it into frames, then vacuuming the remainder of the bees after all the comb and other wax was removed. The only problem was it was raining intermittently and there is not a lot of room in the bucket of the cherry picker for two men and all of their equipment. So we had to make do the best we could and decided to let Billy vacuum the bees out first, them I would join him. He would then cut the comb out and I would put the comb into frames and put the frames in the hive body I had brought.
This is an overall view of the project. The brickwork has already been removed and the hive is exposed. The new addition is going to be added to this section.
Billy has begun the initial vacuuming to get the bulk of the bees out.
Here
is a close-up of Billy vacuuming the bees out. The vacuum is in the bucket with
Billy and the bee box is outside at the extreme left, barely visible with the
vacuum hose attached. After this phase, the vacuum will be removed and I will
join him in the bucket to get the comb out and into frames that will be put into
a hive body.
The rain held off for awhile, long enough to get the bees out and the comb into hive frames. When we were just about finished with the comb, Billy called, "open the lid and get ready for the queen". He had located the queen on the wall after the comb was removed He took off his glove, picked her up and dropped her into the hive body. So with that finished, I closed the hive and came down, took the hive away and put the vacuum back into the bucket and Billy went back up and finished vacuuming the remaining bees out. By the time he finished, there was hardly a bee to be seen flying outside anywhere. Another job successfully finished. Providence Saved.
Miller Time!