Bees play a major role in our environment and our food supply.  They live on nectar and pollen gathered from flowers and trees.  Two thirds our our produce depends on pollination from the honey bee.  “As goes the way of the honeybee, so goes the way of man”-Albert Einstein.

During the springtime, honeybee colonies grow exponentially, and overpopulate the tree, container, or box they live in, and prepare to swarm, which is their way of procreating.  A honeybee colony will grow 5 times its’ size between February, and June.  As they get crowded in their hive, they prepare to swarm.  The queen is actually put on a diet by the attending workers, so that she is able to fly.  Normally during other times of the year, she is too fat to fly. 

So the queen lays “replacement queen” cells, and when it is decided by the group of worker bees that the time for swarming is right, the old queen, plus 40-50% of the hive’s bee population leaves the hive, to find a new “container”.  This container, might be a hollow tree.  It might be a hollow space in a garage wall, or roof soffit, or garden shed with a hollow wall. Once they get into a space like this, they immediately start building wax comb, so that the old queen can start laying eggs to keep the population of the colony up.  Bees only live for six weeks at this time of year.  The queen can live sometimes up to two or three years.

Back at the old hive, the new queens get ready to hatch. Just as they are about to hatch, they all are making a little whistling noise called “queen piping.”   The first new queen out of her cell, finds the other new queens by using this whistling piping method, and chews through their cells and kills them.  There can only be one queen in a colony of honeybees!!

In the new colony, the bees, which arrived all at once in the size of a 1 to 2 basketballs worth of bees, begin life in their new location with a fervor.  They have lots of work to do to get the colony growing and begin collecting Spring nectar which will slowly be dehydrated over the summer into honey which they will live on through the Winter.  Nectar, when it comes out of a flower is 60% water by volume. The bees dehydrate that water content down to 17.3 percent water, and then seal with wax.  It can last for hundreds, even thousands of years like this.  They have even found honey in the Egyptian tombs in clay vessels that was still good.

Getting all those bees out of a wall is no small feat.  There is comb that needs to come out, and all comb that has larvae has to be cut to shape and put into frames so it can be placed into the “catch box’ with the bees that are gently vacuumed in s well. All of this takes time, and the last of the bees have to be finally vacuumed up at dark, when they finally flying.  Honey bees are mostly docile and not aggressive, until you start disturbing  their colony, and then they can get extremely angry, stinging anyone or anything nearby.

Spraying the bees through the hole never works as you only can kill some of the bees and the rest will then become angry.  Additionally all that comb needs to come out of the wall as well, or it will ferment, then smell, then attract ants.

These are some of the reasons, why, if you notice bees flying into your house or property, you need to call a true specialist bee removal specialist like Bee Conscious Removals. 

We know what we are doing when it comes to bee removal and bees.  These bees also get very special treatment when they leave your property, and get great care getting placed in a new bee box, as well as getting honey fed back to them so they can start a new home more easily.  Caring for the bees is of utmost importance to us.  WE LOVE BEES!!

So please call us if we can answer any questions you may have, or if you’d like to schedule an appointment to have us come out and give you a free estimate.

We’ve been doing this for 19 years as a sole profession, so we know what we’re doing.  This is not a part time job for us, we do not do this on the side to make a little extra cash.  This is what we do for a livlihood.

We also carry a full, general liability insurance policy in which your name will be added for your specific job.  This is not cheap but removing bees can be dangerous, especially off the top of a ladder, or on a roof.   Accidentally cutting a hidden wire, or a pipe, is also something our experience over these many years, helps us avoid, but which may not be so easy for less experienced “part-time” bee removal persons especially without this kind of insurance.

Give us a call, we’d love to talk with you. We provide bee honey bee colony removal or honey bee swarm removal service.

Thanks for saving the bees.