and having learned about time and money well spent, this old man would rather build some new frames for that easy bait swarm catch in a few months than spend days on cutting out a colony that will most likely not survive the cutout anyway.
This past summer, my brother in law got the itch to get bees after seeing me play with mine. He picked up a hive body at an auction. Then he found someone with a fixer upper house that had a colony of bees in the wall and soffit at the top of the second story. They were going to put on new siding, and wanted rid of the bees. My brother in law wanted to do a cutout, even though he had never worked with bees. My advice was to take a can of Raid to these bees, and buy a $70 package or catch a swarm next spring, or else charge $100 an hour to remove these bees. He tells the people he will get the bees for free.
Being my brother in law, I can't refuse to help. I let him borrow a bee suit, as all he owned was a veil. I stayed on the ground, and let him be the idiot up top. We managed to get part of the colony removed, carrying combs down in a bucket. Of course, he was trying to save honey too (against my instructions) so bees and everything were covered in honey. After we got several combs removed, we discovered the hive went through a hole up into the roof, and brother in law and homeowners didn't want the roof tore off. The remaining bees in the house got the Raid I recommended to begin with.
He had the bees so ticked off that I got stung 6 or 7 times down on the ground. He stopped counting stings at 20. I never saw the queen. After 2 weeks of having the hive, they appeared queenless, so I donated a frame of eggs and larva from one of my hives. They made 2 queen cells which emerged but never started laying. The hive dwindled and died out after a couple more weeks.
He finally admitted that I was right. A package is much cheaper than spending 5 hours on a ladder doing a cutout for a hive that still dies. And he is almost 20 years older than me...