Advice on Bee Extractions?

[cwood6_10]

Okay everyone I am new to the Forum and i must say that this is the best place to find good information so I am here asking for your help. I buddy of mine has been doing bee extraction for a while and I hoped on board with him. Since I do some novice bee keeping I figured it would be nice to get some new bees.

My first question/advice that I need is this-
I have a lady who has a bunch of Bees in the ceiling in between the first and second floor. They are entering through the siding where it meets. We took two pieces of siding off on the off chance we might be able to get in. We pocked a hole through the ceiling to see if the hanger came out with honey and it did. My question is is there any way, without tearing the ceiling down, that we can get rid of the bees. We are here to save all the bees we can and that is why we are doing this. i don't know if there is anyway that we can save these bees. Some people have said to plug the hole? I want to know if anyone has ahd experience with plugging holes and leaving the honey there. We would have to rip down 1/4 of this ladies ceiling to access all the honey and bees. What should I do? I would like personal experiences also if you don't ,ind sharing.

Second-
When I do a bee extractions it makes it very difficult to get the queen. I am running into the problem of catching all these bees just to see them buzz away 3 days later. ALL GONE :( I really would like to make more hive and add to the ones that I have. Does anybody have any advice on either adding a new queen or what I should do with the bees after I capture them. We are using a vacuum system that has little no no bee loss so we are able to save A LOT of bees. Please advise me on the best way to turn these bees into colonies.

[Michael Bush]

If you brush every comb off into the box and cut every comb of brood to fit and tie it into frames, then the brood should keep them there and the queen will most likely get brushed into the box. if you see her, catch her with a hair clip queen catcher and leave her in the catcher for the next few days. I never use a vacuum.

[cwood6_10]

Well we would not use a vacuum but a lot of the place we do are not very accessible with a brush. we have very little loss and it seems to work fine. I do think that in a lot of cases we will switch to uses it less. especially when it comes to brushing the comb.

[gmcharlie]

Well we would not use a vacuum but a lot of the place we do are not very accessible with a brush. we have very little loss and it seems to work fine. I do think that in a lot of cases we will switch to uses it less. especially when it comes to brushing the comb.

You cannot suck up a queen and expect her to survive or stay put.... FLAT out 1 time out of 100 will it work.

As for removal. this person has honey in her cealing. If you get the bees, the cockroaches and other bugs will move in. She needs a contractor to remove the hive and fix the hole.
You can handle the bees, but if you tell the homeowners there good to go when your done, you have done them a great diservice.

[cwood6_10]

You cannot suck up a queen and expect her to survive or stay put.... FLAT out 1 time out of 100 will it work.

As for removal. this person has honey in her cealing. If you get the bees, the cockroaches and other bugs will move in. She needs a contractor to remove the hive and fix the hole.
You can handle the bees, but if you tell the homeowners there good to go when your done, you have done them a great diservice.

Thank you for that advice. i will surely see about switching from the vacuum to save the queen. I will let the homeowner know.

[Cleo C. Hogan Jr]

gmcharlie....not sure of your vac, but my odds are far, far, far, better than that. I have sucked them out of crevices in rotten trees, from concrete culverts under Hwy 70, out of a steel water storage tank, the control box under a hot tub, the grain head on a combine, a 10 gallon milk can, a concrete telephone pole, a church bell tower, and others. The queen survived and I moved her to a hive. I would say my success rate of the queen surviving is perhaps 80 % or better. There are times you simply cannot get at the bees any other way than vac, and if your vac is right, you have the odds in your favor.

cchoganjr

[hemichuck]

I have used a bee vac on about 30 cutouts and only lost 2 queens.If your getting 1 out of 100 you need to re-evaluate what your doing wrong.

[robherc]

A LOT of the survivability of a vac-out depends on your vac. With my vac there's about a 99.5% or better survival rate, and I expect to see a similar queen survival rate once I've done 200 or so and I've lost my first queen that way! That said, if your bee vac slams the bees into a solid board within 10-20" of the opening of the tube, expect huge mortality rates...you wouldn't survive a 60mph encounter with a solid object very well either.
I'd actually recommend a vac over brushing off the combs. The brush may work better for Mr. Bush, for whom I have the utmost respect, but I've had far better results with my vac than with my brush (fewer abscondings too).

If anyone's interested, I'm working on a web page about my vac (full assembly instructions will be part of the page) I use, it's intended to BE their hive for the first couple days, as it holds top bars &/or frames, so there's no rush to "get them hived," and you could really keep 'em trapped in the vac for 4 days to discourage absconding if you really felt the need...just make sure to spray them with a little 1:1 frequently enough to keep 'em cool & fed.

My Bee-Vac web page (a work in progress)

[cwood6_10]

Rob I am sure impressed with your bee vac. You sent me pics of it on the chat room. Great Job. We made one that you can see through but I like your idea to. NICE!

[cwood6_10]

I see that some people have said that the bee vac works great for them so that is good to hear. I can feel a little better about using it then. Our vac is very gentle on the bees. My next question is how do you go about locating the queen. you all seem to have great success at that and since i am new, I seem to get tangled in the massive amount of bees I have to remove. I still can't imagine how or where I would start to look for here with all the other bees around. I don't quite yet have a great eye for her so any advice on that would be great. thanks buches everyone! We are doing a cutout come monday between the first and second floor and it would be nice to get some incite. I just made wire comb holder frames that turned out great so I am read excited about using that too!

[robherc]

I don't look for the queen when doing cut-outs, at all. Just take every bee you can, if you get 90% of the bees, then you have a bit better than a 90% chance of having gotten the queen (better if you splice the brood combs & take 'em with you). On the removal from the roof of the church, I sorta thought I saw a flash of a red abdomen for about 1/8th of a second, in the middle of sucking up a huge cluster of bees, not sure if that was her or not, but I saw her in the hive today & she DOES have a reddish abdomen, so it's possible.
The main thing to concern yourself with in a cut-out is getting all the bees (alive) you can out of there, removing 100% of the comb (ESPECIALLY the brood comb), splicing & taking a few good sections of brood comb with you, then collecting the cluster of bees that'll re-form sometime between 20min and 5hrs after you get "done." If you do all of that, then you're by far most likely to get the queen, but if you don't (or if she does get hurt), the more bees+brood you have, the faster they'll be able to build back up after making themselves a new queen
BTW, here's the queen from that vac-out, fat & healthy:

As far as the bee vacs go, Michael Bush's complaints about bee vacs were a major part of my inspiration for designing that vac. My mentor kept telling me over & over that I needed to get a bee vac, and I didn't like the sounds of the other vacs from what he had to say about 'em, so I spent SEVERAL hours brainstorming, theorizing, & re-working ideas+concepts, until I came up with answers to most (if not all) of his complaints (and my other concerns) about "all bee-vacs." So, concerning the amount of focused research & innovation I put into it, I'm not entirely surprised by the super-high survivability of my bee vac, but I was quite impressed the first time I used it, as I hadn't dared to expect it to perform as well there as it did
BTW: I just hived a 7lb swarm today that I'd "captured" by dropping several handfuls of them directly into the vac box, then putting the top bars back in & letting 'em "move in" on their own about 36hrs before hiving them permanently...sure made me glad I'd decided to use top bars in the bee vac, since I didn't have an empty nuc in my car when I got that phone call, and they'd already started drawing comb (with nice little eggs in it, too) on the top bars before I got them hived today! (I know, shameless plug...at least I'm offering the plans for free tho)