Bees!!! Bees!!! Bees!!!

Stinging Death From Above!!!

or

Raining Sticky-Sweet Goo From Above!!!

I hate bees....hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, bees....ow, my back hurts...

So, this past weekend, (the first weekend in October) was do or die time. Remove the bees before the neighbors came back from vacation...

We knew that there were two separate hives in the walls of the house, as we've talked about before.

In preparation to remove the BIG hive I built a little clean room out of plastic sheeting and tried to cover things up as much as possible.

Clean room.

Supplies

That white box on the right is the new hive box. I way, way under estimated how much plastic sheeting I was going to need for this...

Suited Up And Read To Rock!

Luckily a local bee keeper (thanks S) had a complete bee suit that I could borrow..though I don't think she realized the horrors I'd be putting her suit through..

I climbed the ladder and started cutting..with the carbide blade it went pretty fast and pretty soon I had the entire hive uncovered.

Closer look at the hive.

The hive was one joist bay wide and ~7' looooong....
Close-up of bee central.

Old House Aside... Check out the clean cut on the lathe and plaster! 

I used a short carbide blade and it worked awesome. With the short blade you can hold the shoe against the plaster so there's really no vibrations and no shaking loose of surrounding plaster. I kept the speed at medium and there was no burning either.

It's funny, the first thing I thought after exposing the hive wasn't OMG I'm surrounded by stinging hell..it was, 'Hey, I've got full 12" joists supporting the 2nd floor of the house, hurray!!!'. The house appears to be built pretty solidly with full 12" joists supporting the two main floors..don't know yet what the top floor (which used to be the attic) has....

More Creepy Bee Pics.

Next The Official Bee Guy climbed the ladder and smoked the bees out...ha...

Actually they barely noticed when I cut the ceiling down around them..which I thought was weird..but WOW when he applied some smoke...MAN the level of noise goes from unsettling to HOLY CRAP!!

What he had to do was scrape the honey comb off the ceiling and try to keep it in as good as shape as possible.

Part Way Done.

He would then hand the chunk of comb to me and I would attempt to vacuum off the bees. The pieces he was keeping went into the new hive held in place with rubber bands.

The Bees just loved Andrew..

Closing up the hive.

I wish I had a video of this..he had a bee vac that was FULL of pissed off bees...then he just opened the vac and dumped the bees on top of the new hive...

The rest of the comb I just vacuumed the bees off of, and put them in big trash bags...we filled 3 BIG contractor bags with excess honey comb..

This is also the point where I was getting stung...on my fricken finger tips!! He'd hand me a chunk of comb and bam I'd get zapped on the finger tips!!! so much fun..we spent like 5 hrs doing this..scraping comb, vacuuming bees, getting stung... I got stung 16 times..turns out I don't really have any reaction to the stings other than the initial pain...

An important step is to seal the bee hive entrance up to stop the bees coming in the house..

I bought the wrong kind of foam so when we thought the hole was sealed it really wasn't...

Then it was vacuum, vacuum, vacuum up the remaining bees and try to clean up the HUGE amazing mess we had created.. On the drop cloth in the entryway was a thick layer of plaster dust, honey, and dead bees...the front entryway to the house was just coated in honey...in fact EVERYTHING was coated in honey..the walls, the tools, us...It had been raining honey on us all day.... We were soaked through with HONEY...so, gross. did I also mention it was really hot that day??? Ugh!!!

I thought pulling down the ceiling in the old place and having it rain rat poop on my was bad..this was worse, wet, sticky, stingy...ugh...

It was a looooong hard 8hr day of overhead labor...ouch, we were both hurting at the end of it...

But, remember that there were two hives.....

The next day I came downstairs with baby madscientist and this is what I saw...

A LOT of bees on the window...loud angry bees...didn't phase baby madscientist at all though..

So, the first thing we had to do on the second day was fix our f-up from the first. We used the bee vac and got the rest of the bees up...then we used the correct super expanding foam and just sprayed the heck out of the place...

There was a stud bay above that had a lot of bees in it so I foamed that up and just foamed the heck out of the area...

One disconcerting thing..(ya just one) there wer a ton of bees boiling out of the hole where the closet bend goes up through the ceiling...this is odd. As I'm pretty sure that it's just plywood, cement board and tile up there...where in the heck were the bees coming from? Did they colonize the underside of the toilet?...Now I'm afraid to pull the toilet to reset it correctly on its flange (it wobbles, but doesn't leak)...

After the super foam job and one more run with the vacuum it looked like we had finally filled the entrance...

Now on to the second hive in baby madmadscientist's room....

Annnnnnd we're done... well, we forgot to take pictures.. but this hive was way, way, way easier to do.. just drywall, no lathe-plaster, very small, just the space here where an old gas wall heater used to live...and lots and lots of foam...

This extraction was textbook and only took a couple of hours...

While small, the hive appeared to be very, very, very old..

Bee Graveyard...

This stud bay was filled with dead bees...like two feet thick..that was kinda gross, the ones on the bottom where practically compost...smelled weird too, kinda musty...

We foamed the HECK out of the entrance and got it right the first time..no new bees...

Here's a couple shots of the outside of the entrance..we foamed it good...

Die bees DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!

Got a little over exuberant with the foam...die bees die!!!

On the second day either of us hardly got stung...I got stung only three times...but one of those times.....
Some sort of special ops bee got me.. It crawled up inside the leg of the bee suit. All the way up my leg and into the shorts I was wearing...it was stopped by the snug elastic leg band of the tighty-whiteys I was wearing...and it stung me right there!!! If I had been wearing super cool boxers it probably would of stung me on my meat and two veg!!!

We loaded up the hives into Andrew's Car and cleaned up our mess as best we could.

We had tracked honey and dead bee guts down the stairs and all over the front house entrance...
I got to break out the mop bucket and hot water and moped everything...then I mopped it again...and then I mopped it again..

Everything is sticky from honey, all the tools, the shop vac, the extension cords...everything we touched...door handles...walls..windows... This is going to send me to the nut house chattering about 'Sticky, sticky sticky....'

Oh, almost forgot, my 'haul' after 12+ hrs of work...

HoneyComb.

Guess what everybody is getting from us for Christmas???

Funny enough, I have no desire to even taste the stuff...Andrew said it tasted quite good...it was raining honey on him so hard that it leaked thru his netting and into his mouth...

Final Tally
me-20 bee stings
Andrew- way over twenty..mostly on his fingers...
200 pounds of honeycomb extracted from the big hive...
20 pounds of honey comb for us to keep...

Parting Shot.

This was taken midway through the day...at this point I was thinking...I shoulda hired a pest company to kill the buggers then I coulda 'removed the comb' with a flat bladed shovel and been done with this entire mess in half a day with no stings...This experience really, truly sucked...just about as bad as getting an MRI (my new standard of super suckiness).

YAY!!!!! WE'RE URBAN BEE KEEPERS!!!!!!!

Oh, Wait, No.......

Here's an update to the bees in the wall story.

Well have we got bees....we gots lots and lots and lots of bees....

Y'all will remember from an earlier post that we have a bee hive in the wall on the North side of the house.

When we bought the house it was cold outside and there where only like one or two bees that we'd see.  We knew we had to remove it but we didn't think it was anything that big of a deal...

Well, now that its warm outside the swarm of bees outside the hive entrance is quite HUGE!!!

You can actually see the cloud of bees quite clearly in the afternoon from the neighbors yard....if the cloud of bees is proportional to the size of the hive then...we have a fricken huge hive!!!

Turns out its really hard to take pictures of bees, even with Mrs. Madmadscientist's fancy pants camera but here are a couple of tries.

Those shots were taken in the morning when the swarm was still small. 

I think I've figured out where they are in the structure of the house.

Take a look at this pic.

I can hear a clicking/water dripping noise from that area. I think the bees came in at the pipe penetration and expanded horizontally into the joist bay.

But Wait, There's More!!!

A couple of weeks ago there was like a freaky horror movie sized swarm outside the house for a couple of hours....guess what that means??...yep the original hive got too big for its britches and divided!!

Where did the new colony go???

Oh, about 10 feet to the left and started a new hive!! Also in our walls!!!! Hurray!!!!! We're urban beekeepers!!! I don't know if this is normal but the ground outside the old hive was literally covered with dead bees? Maybe it was a bloody coup?

Here's the entrance to the new hive.

That's the exhaust pipe for an old gas wall heater that was in baby madmadscientist's room at one time....somebody removed the heater and patched the wall but didn't bother to remove the venting pipe!!  I guess that they thought that the single layer of duct tape would be a sufficient barrier....

Here's a shot from the inside. You can just make out the ghosted outline of the old wall heater.

If you put your ear to the wall here you can totally hear bees buzzing and going about their work. It looks like they have access to this entire stud bay....Hurray!!!!!

So, now we've got two hives....all we need now is a chicken coop and we'll be super hip urban farmers!! Hurray!!!!

Help!!!

We need to remove these bees ASAP. My neighbor on that side is getting pretty pissed off at us for not doing it sooner. The bees poop all over their car (it's yellow) and they wash it a couple times a week now....

Also, we can't really reroof or repaint until they are gone...

I looked into having them removed safely by a pro.

It seems like such a raw deal for us. Here's how it works. You pay them ~$600 per hive and they will come out and bust into your walls and remove the bees and the comb and the honey. Then you are responsible for cleaning up the rest of the mess (which I've heard is substantial) and repairing the damage yourself!!! We don't even get to keep the honey!!! All told, I'm estimating that it will cost like $3k to solve this issue....

OR...

I can buy some poison and nuke both hives and be done with it for under $100....

I don't want to do that. I understand how important bees are to the survival of the human race. If the bees go, we go a couple of weeks later...

But c'mon bee keepers...do you see why more hives get nuked than safely removed?

My ideal solution:

I'd like to work with the removal team to remove the portions of the house that need to be in a way that will make it as easy as possible to replace. Then I want the dang honey!!!! We could give it away as gifts to our neighbors to make up for the inconvenience. Then, well, I don't want to pay for it of course...

What I find funny about urban bee keeper folks is when you tell them the situation they really, really, pour on the 'don't kill them please!!!!' stuff but then when you ask them to remove them they're like, 'oh we only take hives if they are in a bush reachable without a ladder'!?!?!?!!? LAME!!

C'mon beekeeper save-the-bees types. Put your money where your mouth is!!!