Elmer's Bees Part Three - Finale

Ceebs and I showed up ready to collect bees on a nice cool morning.  Ignore small camera on the tripod.  It was ready and on but someone forgot to press the button to activate it.  No video this time.  I was able to seal the gap between the super and Bee Vac sections ahead of time, that is the blue tape..  We had good suction.

It was like a jungle in there.  Elmer likes his palm trees and things were pretty dense.

That is our target, dead center.

The bees entered a drain hole on the black bucket and had filled the white piece full of comb.  Once we started this went rather quickly.  I put the palm tree on it's side and Ceebs handled the Bee Vac.  (Once someone moved the main intake hose from the exhaust hole and put it where it belonged.)  The bees went in quickly and I handled comb.  We ended up with six or seven frames with plenty of brood and some honey/pollen. 

Plenty of brood in the comb. these bees should stay when the hive is set up.  We did see on small hive beetle but it fell off.  That is not a surprise, this hive was directly on the ground and beetles need to return to the earth to complete their life cycle.   Any beetles in the earlier hive will die off, my hives are on concrete and there is not way for them to reach earth to complete the cycle.   I alert the new owners of these bees.  Not a big hive but they had swarmed a time or two according to the empty swarm cells we saw.

 

The bees seemed rather calm once we had them in place.  That may change when the hive is set up. It is that E-ticket ride down the vacuum tube that may annoy them a little but they should return to being the nice calm little hive they were when we gathered them up.

Ceebs stowing the last of the gear.  Once again I had a great person on the Bee Vac so I could do the "stand up -not kneeling job" aka put comb into frames.  I love that and appreciate it.  We needed another set of hands for a photo but this will have to do.   The bees should be off to their new home later today.  Thanks Ceebs.

 

Another Bee Rescue for Backwards Beekeepers.

Off to more Bee Adventures as the Rescue Hot Line lights up with calls.