Went up to Cortland, NY to remove bees from my mother’s house. Set up post jacks, where it looked like the bees would be….. immediately had to go around the corner with a ladder. remove the soffit from the overhang.
Someone was living here before…
a wad of wasp nest and fiberglass insulation.
3 hours later… 3 hours of standing on top of a shaky old stepladder and running a sawsall blind…. up over my head! This is what I had to show for my exhaustion:
yup the bees are behind what I thought was a bit of blocking I couldn’t budge.
Day 2, Plan B: go in through the 2 x 10:
Oh yeah there they are!
Plan B works exactly as I expected plan A to work. I cut and reassemble comb, and vacuum up bees in my version of a bee vac. (for anyone who does not know a “bee vac” is a device you attach to a shop vac to capture the bees ALIVE in.
there’s the sucked up bees, the white stripe is a gate that will be opened to reunite them with the brood once everything is put up together. a lot of bees end up travelling into the other hive body with the brood. I couldn’t get a picture because I didn’t want honey all over my camera.
a bit of good clean comb for me!
here’s the site of the devastation… WTF I thought the joists went the other way!! I could see that from the hole in the soffit!
you can see the cut I made yesterday on the right!
So next I scrape that all mostly clean and wipe up/scoop up most of the spilled honey, and fill it with Great Stuff ™ so that no one else can move in. then close all of the entry points and fill them with more foam.
Now It’s up to my Brother to replace the siding so that I can get my post jacks back.
and I get to have some fresh honey!
Bee well 😉
count your bee stings.. I mean fingers…
K
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