Feral Bee Extraction

The bee vacuum

I joined my local bee group on Saturday 1st April for some demolition work. A feral colony had established in the space between 2 walls where a window had been bricked up.

The day was quite hard work but very interesting. At the end of it we had a Warre hive with some brood; plenty of bees and maybe a queen. We never found her so we can't be sure until the hive settles down.

It was a lot harder work than taking a swarm. I wonder whether it wouldn't have been better to make them voluntarily vacate the space. Maybe smoke and heat would make them abscond?

The day progressed like this:

We chopped the plaster until we found the infill for the window. We then started chopping out the brick and plaster, which was easier than I'd expected. We started at the opposite side from the colony entrance and so it was very quiet. There was a big sheet of propolised comb which seems to have been abandoned. There was a lot of wax moth and at least one big spider within the cavity.

We continued to chop out the bricks, clad in our bee suits. Very few bees came out, and nobody was successfully stung. They were surprisingly calm. We found layers of heavily propolised comb. It had access holes through, and was joined in places.

We cut the comb in large sheets until we exposed the brood area. These sections were cut and passed to Paul and Ann who tied them into Warre frames. These are small, and I prefer Richard's method of passing large sheets into a Langstroth hive, with bamboo canes to separate them. The tying method was slow and fiddly but it does mean that the hive should be fully operational from the outset, which is a bonus.

As we cut away more comb we may have missed opportunities to catch the queen(s). More bees retreated to the gaps in the brickwork and at the back of the window's lintel. We used a bee hoover to extract these.

Eventually the cavity was empty, apart from bees which were returning from foraging. All the bees which had not been stricken in the extraction were in the hive. We moved it about 100m from the original site.

Ann explained that it is possible to move medium distances (between 3 feet and 3 miles) if you gather returning bees at the old site and put them into the hive at the new site. Putting an unexpected obstacle by the hive entrance also encourages them to go on orientation flights. Three repeats was considered enough.