Bees in garage wall

[Gene Weitzel]

Photos of a cutout I did on Saturday. The owner said they had been there about a year. LOL Most the comb was black as night except for the top two foot, so I figure that they had been there at least 4 years. Did not see the queen, but found 6 sealed queen cells.

http://i210.photobucket.com/albums/bb226/geneweitzel/Bees%20in%20garage/DSCF0001.jpg?t=1207757993

http://i210.photobucket.com/albums/bb226/geneweitzel/Bees%20in%20garage/DSCF0002.jpg?t=1207758199

http://i210.photobucket.com/albums/bb226/geneweitzel/Bees%20in%20garage/DSCF0004.jpg?t=1207758269

http://i210.photobucket.com/albums/bb226/geneweitzel/Bees%20in%20garage/DSCF0005.jpg?t=1207758306

[peggjam]

Nice.....the good thing about queen cells is you don't have to find the queen, just treat the queen cells like gold. How many splits did you make from this, looks like you could've used all 6 cells:).

[Aisha]

That is impressive, Gene. Those bees are packed in there. I bet those bees have good genes.

[allrawpaul]

That looks like a lot of bees. How many boxes did they fill?

[The Bee Man]

That's a nice bunch of bees. I do swarm and colony removal in Arizona. If you don't mind me asking, what did you charge for the job? Just always want to make sure I'm reasonable on my prices. Of course, in this part of the country the bees probably would have been AHB. That's OK, we just requeen them and most of the time they settle down and go to work.
Thanks,
Monty

[Gene Weitzel]

That looks like a lot of bees. How many boxes did they fill?

I actually "stuffed" them into one deep since they only had about 6 frames of brood, but they are ready for a second deep now. The photos make it look much larger that it really was, the combs are only thee inches wide. My last inspection of them was quite pleasant. They did not even fly when I lifted the top and just milled around on the top bars like I was not even there.

[Gene Weitzel]

That's a nice bunch of bees. I do swarm and colony removal in Arizona. If you don't mind me asking, what did you charge for the job? Just always want to make sure I'm reasonable on my prices. Of course, in this part of the country the bees probably would have been AHB. That's OK, we just requeen them and most of the time they settle down and go to work.
Thanks,
Monty

I charge $100.00 per hr with a 2hr minimum for the actual time spent cutting them out. In this case it worked out to $400.00 plus mileage. I find that if I make sure that the owner visually sees the extents of the hive, even from a fair distance, when I first get it exposed, they are suddenly very amicable toward my fees.