Well,  a long awaited adventure has finally materialized!

The boys have been interested in bees for several years now, and we studied up on them last winter. There’s was old church building in our area with bees in it, and several months ago, we found out that it was being torn down. We got permission to salvage the bees by cutting out the combs and re-hiving them. This would not only save the bees from destruction, but would also give us an opportunity to start out with “wild” bees that may be more resistant to the diseases and varroa mites which are killing off many hives around the world.

We chose a cloudy day to tackle the job, hoping that more bees would be at home, and they would be more docile.

Someone had tried to eradicate the bees before, so it was relatively easy to open up the wall and expose them.

We found some beautiful, new, white comb filled with honey. In our ignorance, we decided to put a quantity of this into frames and into the hive.  We later ended up removing some of it to make room for more brood comb. Of course, the bees do need some honey reserves for the winter, but they had lots of honey in the brood combs as well.

As the bees got more agitated, I couldn’t get my mind off the angry buzzing in my face, and the memory of a recent sting that had left its painful effects for days after. So I finally chickened out, and allowed Caleb to get into my veil – which he didn’t need any coaxing to do! He was quite excited to get right into                                                         the thick of the bees.

Here I am handing the smoker to Caleb, while Jesse is bringing down a piece of comb that he cut out.

When the first section was finished, and we had not found brood, we discovered that there was another large section to the left that was full of comb, both brood and honey, and still another one started, containing only honey. A very large colony! So Jesse started hacking away at that.

Here Caleb is fitting a comb into the frame with rubber bands and string. The bees will fix it up later with new comb according to their desires.

We found out later that this is mostly drone comb, which is useless for hive growth. But we will let the bees sort it all out for now.

In this picture Caleb is shaking the bees into the hive out of the box that we were using to carry the comb from inside the building. Jesse cut out comb, I brought them out, and Caleb would fit them into frames, and put them into the hive.

This is a Layens horizontal hive, with deep frames and thick walls for better insulation in the winter.

After waiting several days, we went back yesterday in the evening, to bring home our new colony. We realized we should have brush the bees out of the empty cavity right after the removal, but since we hadn’t, we did that now. Jesse took a brush and a bucket, and gently brushed them in, then he put a screen on top and brought them down to Caleb. Caleb carried them outside and dumped them into the hive while Jesse brushed off some more.

When they got too agitated, he would have to wait until they settled on the wall again, and get another batch. After doing this for a while, we left the rest of them in the cavity, and closed the hive at dusk. We placed a swarm trap into the cavity to provide a home for the remaining bees if they chose to go in. The lemongrass oil we put inside its entrance may attract them to go inside.  After a week or two, we plan to go back to get the residual bees and add them to the colony.

We brought the hive home after dark, and placed it in the shady area near the pond that we had picked out for it. We were all quite excited to bring the girls home – much more so than we would have been if we had bought a box of bees from a beekeeper!  And we have a much larger colony than we would have got that way, and hopefully more hardy.

Such was our initiation into beekeeping! Now we hope we can keep them alive and thriving. We’ll update you again some day.