backyard beehives?

ajy

I get calls from people all the time wanting me to remove beehives... it is not worth the effort... they should just be poisoned... it is only really worth your time removing swarms... when i first got my hives i was desperate to get bees in them so i tryed removing hives from trees... i wouldn't recommend it...

Snags

I got my hive out of my compost bin
It wasn't that hard a cardboard box and piece of cardboard to scoop them up
It was easy access and maybe I was lucky they were friendly bees

Belleye

ajy wrote:

they should just be poisoned....

My grandfather has a great technique that involves a aluminum can half full of petrol and a wire hook on top. He uses a broom stick with a groove on the end to position it at the entry point of the hive. The bees soon move on.... A little more humane IMO.

Brian Fanner

Yep. Sometimes you can spend hours and hours removing a swarm only to find the swarm buggers of on you the next day, or slowly dies off. The best is if you get natural trek swarms that move in to catch boxes or hives you put out. If you are lucky and you spot a swarm on the move you can sometimes get it to land by running after it throwing sand in the air. Or spot a trek swarm resting up somewhere. I would only try and remove a swarm if its in a really accessible place where you can easily cut out the combs. Otherwise it a bit of a nightmare. I will only remove swarms for people if they pay because you could very likely be wasting your time. Otherwise just buy a packaged swarm.

Ellendra

gorotsuki69 wrote:

coming from the flip side, are there beekeepers who are willing to remove a unwanted beehives?
I had a hive in my rental house and had to call in a pestie to spray. Was a bit of a waste. The tenants said the house smelled of honey on warm days.

I have a friend in Texas who removes bees for a living. She says it usually requires tearing out a lot of the wall and sometimes the roof, so it's a pretty major project. If they don't get all the comb out, it can melt and then the honey ruins the walls and can short out wiring. She posted a picture of one of the houses she worked on, they had to tear the walls off 2 whole sides of the house, along with 1/4 of the roof, because of how big the hive was!

(She doesn't rebuild the house afterward, so part of her contract includes that the homeowner must have a contractor lined up and ready to start rebuilding as soon as she's done.)

JMC

We are close on our greenhouse and i have been spending a lot of time on this site to minimise the mistakes in my proposed design and i noticed this thread. We keep bees and are familiar with the process of removing bees from structures. What has been said is true , it's mostly not worth the troubles for several reasons. The first is you can buy a nuc for $65 US and that is 5 frames of various stages of a hive, a queen,and some bees. So the bottom line is if you can't do the job in an hour you then you lost on the job. Also if you do the job and can extract enough of the hive with queen, bees (workers & drones) you stand a chance of being able to have a hive that will survive. A lot of people who do this will elect to combine the bees with a week hive or add frames of brood and honey with the recovered hive. There is another way of removing a hive and that is a trap out which has been detailed on besource.com where you place a one way out box at their entrance and leave it for period (at least 21 plus days , i say 30) to effectively move the bee hive to a new containment. The likelyhood of success is improved by supplementing the trap box with brood and honey frames for the trapped out bees to intergrate with. After the trap out period is over you seal the new hive and move it to aq new location at least 2 or 3 miles away. After that you will want to go into the cavity where they were and remove all the old workings. The last and probably the most important part is you must make sure you seal all possible openings to the old workings otherwise the bees being very resourceful will move right back in.

Brian Fanner

A bit off topic but I have harvested 120kg's of honey this season so far. Really stoked....

ccBear

The old saying on moving hives is 3 feet or 3 miles. If you want to just move on your property 3 feet every few days. If removing an unwanted hive or swarm them a minimum of 3 miles or 7 kilometres anf leave for at lest a month before returning.

Bender

We had a swarm of bees move into a wall cavity of our house recently. I called an apirist who explained it would he too difficult and destructive to remove. In the end I had to spray them with pyrethrum and then fill the entry hole with gap filler. So they would have died in the wall cavity. Not the result I wanted but I couldn't see a way around it without costing $$$ at the time

Lord Viykor

I've got 3 native bee hives in my garden close to my aquaponics, added a honey bee hive to the other side of my backyard.

Always have plenty of bees around my grow beds collecting water. The bonus is plenty of fertilised plants in the aquaponics and dirt garden beds.

Callatya

I'm thinking of getting the stingless variety as I have too many people who would need a speedy ambulance trip otherwise. Quite a shame that I won't really be able to harvest much, if at all.

We had a nest of honey bees in the wall as a kid. The toilet wall. It hummed. Nobody wanted them, and repeated attempts at letting off bog bombs through a hose failed, so in the end someone said to make a landing strip and cover it in tomato dust. Worked within 3 days. It was really very sad. I had honey coming through the base of my wall of years. Nobody believed that was what it was!

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