Bee removal from a communication tower

I heard there were "hundreds" of bees flying around the base of the communication tower at Watson B. Duncan Middle School in Palm Beach Gardens Florida.

I went by to check it out during a downpour.  There wasn't a bee to be seen but the principal showed me the electrical box where the bees had been seen. I returned the next morning and verified they were honey bees and by the presence of pollen on the legs of the returning foragers I guessed that they had established themselves a hive inside the electrical box.  The principal had a preschool summer camp starting the following Monday in the vicinity where the bees were established and he wanted the bees removed.  The Districts pest control department is sympathetic to live bee removal but if there isn't time to get a beekeeper to remove the bees then pest control will spray the area and clean up the mess later.  I could see the only way to rescue the bees and appease the principal was to volunteer to come in on Saturday and remove the bees myself.
It was still pouring Saturday morning and into the afternoon; remnants of tropical storm Andrea.  After the rain stopped I loaded my equipment up and arrived at the site in the early afternoon.

The bees had established a hive inside an electrical junction box at the base of the radio antenna.









There were eight pieces of comb with almost all of it dedicated to brood production.  There was only a small portion of nectar at the top of the middle section of comb.



I applied a little bit of smoke to the hive prior to opening the box and a little bit more prior to beginning the removal of the bees.  My preferred method of removal is a homemade version of the Bushkill Bee Vac.  It uses the sucton from a shop vacuum to aspirate the bees directly into a hive box.  In the photo above the device is in the left hand corner of the fence enclosure and it is resting on its side.  The hose going out of the photo to the left is connected to a shop vacuum and the hose coiled on the ground is used to aspirate the bees into the bottom of a two story nucleus hive box.

After several minutes of aspirating bees the comb begins to become exposed revealing capped brood cells.

Once the majority of the bees that I can reach have been vacuumed into the hive box I begin cutting out the sections of comb and vacuuming the bees off the sides of comb I was unable to reach.  After all the comb has been removed I cut the comb into sections that will fit inside a medium Langstroth frame.  I was able to fill five frames with brood comb from this hive and still had a small portion of comb left over.

By luck I spotted the queen and a small cluster of her worker bee court hanging on the side of one of the conduit seen in the right of this photo.  I trapped her in a queen clip and wedged the clip between two frames for the trip home.







When I was finished the Electrical box was cleaned out of comb and bees except for a few returning foragers.





Once I got the bees home I disassembled the bee vacuum and placed the hive on a screened bottom board and added a telescoping lid.

The base of the bee vacuum on the left has several hundred dead bees. There are often casualties caused by aspirating the bees into a hive but I use it because it is most efficient in getting the bees under control quickly.  The screened lid on the right contains live bees that will move into the hive before nightfall.

The next morning I opened the hive to do some rearranging and to check on the queen.  She was no longer in the queen clip so somehow she squeezed her way out of the clip.  The bottom board had more dead adult bees as well as larvae and pupa that the workers had pulled out of the comb that were damaged while cutting the comb to fit the frames.

There are always gong to be casualties when doing bee removal but it beats losing all of them by spraying with a pesticide.

The hive has been joined to my other hives in a home apiary.  I gave them a box of empty frames with foundation and a bottle of sugar water to get them started in comb building.