It all started with a small hole in a garden wall about 2 years ago, which looked like a safe place for some bees to hang out. Fast forward to 2015 and the family living there are concerned about the state of the wall and the brickie who agrees to fix it would like the bees removed before he starts work ( can't say I blame him!).
So its just a case of finding someone who is brave (a.k.a. daft) enough to try to get them out of the wall...
It doesn't look that intimidating does it?
Just a little tap or two to get a few bricks loose...
Ah.....maybe they don't like that so much...
Thankfully the mortar is very soft so the bricks come out quite easily....unfortunately there seems to be rather a lot of wild honeycomb behind them...
We set the bricks carefully to one side....
And got on with digging the wild comb from the cavity inside the wall...
They were pretty big pieces of comb, most of which was full of honey...
Eventually we found some that had brood in...
And were relieved to find the back of the wall cavity...
The problem now...was just how far the colony extended to the sides. Leftwards we appear to have found the edge..
But rightwards....that seemed to go on a way up and on to the right...
It was time to scoop as many as possible into the box, and tip them into the hive...
Unfortunately that meant that that we also got rather a lot of brick dust in with the bees at the same time...
What a good job we can tie most of those frames of honey into another box...at least they'll have some clean food to keep them going in their new home...
Meanwhile a closer inspection of the wall and a quick committee meeting started to strongly suspect that there was either a second entrance to the colony in the wall or a completely separate second colony...
There was definitely no sign of the queen, nor any bees scenting and fanning to indicate the queen was in the hive...
And rather too many bees still hanging around on the wall looking like they want to go back home...
There's nothing else for it, we are just going to have to clear as many bees off the grass as we can...
Make the cavity in the wall as inhospitable and obnoxiously smelly as we can...
And pop the roof on the hive and hope that as many as possible can be persuaded to move in overnight...
The things we do for bees eh?
