Who you goin' to call?
BEE BUSTERS!!
This has been a SERIOUSLY CrAzY week!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRGHHHH!
Last Tuesday (Sept. 1st) I felt like I was trapped in a horror movie:
ATTACK OF THE KILLER BEES!~
Scott's new hobby is beekeeping, and I love that he loves it, and I love it that it gives us great raw healthy honey, but sometimes it has brought us some STICKY & Stressful situations. (haha)
Many months ago, he bought himself a hive along with a bunch of bee equipment. As he got more comfortable with handling them, he decided he wanted a few more hives. He did a lot of research and reading, and then starting posting on Craigslist that he'd remove beehives for free in return for the Bees & honey.
Earlier this spring, the kids and I got to watch him and my sister Mary Cate capture a live bee swarm. It was awesome to watch. After harvesting a bunch of honey from our first hive, and seeing how tasty it was, Scott was pining for more bees!
He has tried multiple times to catch himself a heathly hive of bees. The first time he brought home a new hive, it was too weak. Our two beehives had a battle, the more established hive won, and then Yellow Jackets attacked the weakened hive and moved into the hive body.
Then Scott started doing research on making himself a "BEEVAC". It is a Vaccuum designed to suck up bees safely for removal and establishing a new hive. Brand new they cost over $200. He figured he could download the plans, and make his very own from scraps he had laying around. Scott made it with some help from Porter Bassett, and it was a huge success!!! It looks amazing. It works brilliantly. He was SOOO excited to try it out!
Scott actually used pieces of his leaf blower to complete his BeeVac..how's that for ingenuity?On the maiden voyage of the BeeVac, he extracted some bees from a barn up Gooseneck in Sheridan. It was a resounding success, everyone was impressed. Scott could proudly say he owns 2 healthy happy thriving hives. He just wanted ONE MORE....three hives, and that was his limit. Scott's goal was to have 3 hives on our land: making honey for us, and pollinating everyone else's gardens: a Win-Win situation!
The next find that came his way, was a BIG project. We checked it out numerous times before tackling it. In McMinnville, next door to the post office, is an older house with an established hive living in it's walls.
Just looking at this picture, you can see the moisture of the honey seeping through the wood siding. Scott was going to have to take apart THE WALL of the house in order to get the bees out!!! This was an all day deal.
We could see from the very beginning that it was going to be a huge project, we just had NO IDEA how HUGE it was going to turn out to be!!!
So Scott chose Monday (his day off) so he would have all day to work on it. However, this was the Monday that we always go to the State Fair as a family. We planned to go to the fair later in the afternoon, contingent upon how the bee capturing went. Scott just had NO CLUE how long it might take him.
First Scott followed the studs and cut with a circular saw beneath the hole where the bees were coming out.
Then Scott pulled the siding away to expose the hive. Mary Cate Bassett came as partner and helper in the enterprise.
They used the BeeVac to suck the bees off each board as it was pulled off.
After exposing the hive they vacuumed the bees off the comb, so it could be removed and placed into frames.
They had thought the hive was just that one section, but when pulling off the last board, they discovered it was only the tip of the iceberg...I mean honeycomb ;) .
Then things began going awry. In hindsight, Scott now realizes that his first mistake was not putting the removed comb in Beehive frames and storing them in a bee proof box
right away. This was not needed in the first extraction he did in the barn. The barn was enclosed. This outside wall was not. Bees from different hives in the area started investigating the comb and reporting back to their home hives. Within 30 minutes huge reinforcements began arriving unnoticed during our excitement of discovering the enormous size of this incredibly monstrous HIVE!
In this picture, the center hive, or brood comb, has been removed.The second mistake was exposing the hive all at once. The new unnoticed bee reinforcements began swarming the comb already extracted. While these bees were trying to get the honey from the extracted comb, their scouts noticed the honey in the wall hive. Then all bets were off. It was a feeding frenzy. Bees were doing serious battle. It was like war of the worlds out there! Mary Cate said later to me that at this point in the adventure she began thinking things like "This is CRAZY....I can't believe we're doing this!" She also told me that she thought Scott was as "Cool as a cucumber" during the stressful situation. This event turned into a serious crisis, because instead of finishing removing the hive, Mary Cate literally spent 2 or 3 hours just sucking up all the attacking enemy bees with the BeeVac. In her words, "It was Insane".
This decision was in fact the third mistake. They were combating this swarm by sucking them (the invading bees) into the beevac with the wall hive. There was a ongoing battle in the beevac!
At this time, Scott and Mary realized they had to call it quits. There were too many bees. There was no way to get them all. Bees were EVERYWHERE. Scott and Mary placed the removed comb in frames, quickly cut the remaining honey out of the wall, and placed it in plastic bags. Man was it heavy! It filled up two Huge garbage sacks worth. Getting all the equipment into the van without filling the car with rogue bees was extremely difficult.
**Funny Story: This took place in downtown McMinnville, so there were lots of pedestrians gawking. Every once and a while, a person would stop and say, "Cool! Look at those people. Are they bee keepers? Where are the bees?" And then they'd walk a little closer and see swarms of the little black critters flying to and fro. They'd usually run away screaming , "Aaaaah! Beeeees!"
Back at home, the saddest part was when the bees were being transferred to the bee box. We were all set up to let loose this wonderful strong hive! We were all siked up! Everyone was filled with the soaring feeling of victory. We even had the cameras rolling. Then the tragedy hit full force. As Scott opened the beevac and dumped the bees into the box, he was horrified to see that 90 percent of the bees had died. Scott was devastated. What a horrible waste!!!
He thinks it was a combination of the vacuum being 'turned up' too strong and the internal bee battle from the foreign bees and the colony from the wall. Scott had needed to turn the beevac up to full strength when removing the bees from the barn and that had worked perfectly with no noticable bee deaths. However, the vacuum motor must have made a better seal this time around and been too strong, banging the bees into the ribbing of the vacuum hose on the way to the box. This is his theory, however, we'll never really know why some 40,000 bees died. Maybe the BeeVac was just too full and they all suffocated. (This is Mary Cate's pet theory) If Scott ever does an extraction this big again, he'll probably want a few bee boxes on hand! One is just not enough.
Scott then left the remaining bees to the extracted brood comb and we went to the fair. (This part of the story to be continued in my next posting)
The next day, Scott inspected the hive to see if the remaining bees were enough to maintain the hive if requeened. (He can easily order another queen bee, but without a queen the hive is doomed) There were only about 50 to 100 of the probably 40,000 left alive. The brood comb was then added to the hive we took from the barn. Bees are quite accepting of the larvae of another bee nest while still in the comb; once bees emerge they are accepted as hive mates. That is acceptable to them. If any other already hatched bee tries to enter the hive they are fought off or killed.
On a positive note, the retreived honey was squeezed from the honey comb and it made about 4 gallons of honey! Woooohooooo! Scott is going to feed this to the barn hive to help them build up their honey stores for winter. I'm sure we'll get to eat some of it, too.
On another positive note, Mary and Scott got SO MUCH honey from their daring bee affair, that they are considering whether it might be worth it to do this again in the future. Next time, they just plan on being Speedy Gonzalez in extracting comb and tucking it away before being attacked.
Now, here's where the attack of the bees horror film comes in:
The last time we processed Honey, it was at night in the garage, and we had no problems of any kind. So we didn't anticipate any difficulty this time. We didn't take it into account that it was daytime, as well as the end of the gathering season...so the bees were mad to get honey, especially since they'd just been moved.
The honey processing turned into quite a hair-raising experience. Scott began with the windows open and at once the bees smelled the honey and swooped into the house to get some. It was a bee mad house! Luckily we had screens on the windows, but it was freaky!
Scott closed the windows, but the harm was already done. The bees circled the windows and the door (where they sould still smell the honey on the drafts of air escaping) and would not leave. Scott was picking bees off the comb like crazy, and put them into a glass quart jar to be taken outside. (He wants to rescue the bees, no killing honeybees allowed, of course)
Christopher was told to take the quart jar to the garden. At this point we still didn't know that the bees were coming and telling all their friends. A bee flew in front of Christopher's face and scared him. Chris dropped the jar, and it broke scattering glass shards and bees everywhere. Scott wanted Christopher to quickly sweep up the mess, because his hands were covered with honey. Christopher was scared, of course, and crying because he was afraid of being stung. So Scott put a jar of honey into the garden thinking that would distract the bees from the glass breakage, and give Chris a chance to get things cleaned up. Well, the break only lasted a few minutes. Christopher had been told to clean it up before he came in, and Scott was busy processing the honey. He had no clue what was going on in the backyard.
I was gone at the store shopping. When I came into the garage, I noticed the bees were flying everywhere. I jumped out of the van and ran into the house, screaming nearly in hysterics. Scott didn't believe me yet that there were a lot of bees, he just thought there was one or two. But when he went into the garage to rescue Angel from the van (whom I had abandoned in my fright) he realized that we were in serious trouble. I looked out the window to see poor Christopher pacing the back edge of the fence, crying in terror, because bee swarms were covering all our doors, and he was afraid to get near the house. (Everywhere Scott had touched with his honey dripping hands, was now covered in bees eagerly licking up every last drop) I opened a side glass door, called him to run, and our poor firstborn was saved. He was drenched with sweat and tears. (He bounced back resiliently within 5 minutes, looking out the windows and oohing and aahing at all the cool bees to be seen from the safety of the house now that he was no longer outside). I felt like we were in a giant PeopleVac....we were the captives, and the bees had us hostage!
My groceries were still in the car. And there they would stay till it was dark because I wasn't even going to open the doors an inch. I was thoroughly freaked out at this point, and even though the situation isn't as bad as my words make it sound, I'm trying to paint a picture of how I felt. I was so happy when sunset arrived and all the bees went to bed. It's a horrible horrible feeling to be trapped. I have sympathy for all those people in the horror movies, stuck in their houses with the monsters outside, ready to get them the moment their guard is down.
Scott had to go to work, leaving a sticky mess and a TON of bees outside. Scott decided to finish up after work (he got home at 12:00 am) and worked on the honey and cleaning up till 3:30 am! But oh the honey we have! Mary took about 2 gallons and we still have the other two. Even now, if you touch our counter, chairs, or cupboards, there seems to be a slight sticky residue! It's annoying me immensely.
Oh well, let all things give thee experience! Scott says he learned a lot, and so have I. I am a little worried though, Scott is still one hive short of his desired total of 3 and someone has informed him of a feral hive in a tree near their home. Oh well, what harm can one more hive cause? Whatever happens, it can't be a bad as this last time....can it?
mmm...what adventure awaits us next?
