Cut-out 5-30-09

My friend, Gabe Blatt, called & told me there were bees under the eaves in an old house in West Huntington. We met up with new beekeeper, Pete Meadows, to do the cut out & try and save these bees. We met the owner's neighbor, Kathy Seelinger, who told us that this was the third oldest house in Huntington.
When we looked up, we saw lots of honeycomb & bees.

Up we all went onto the scaffolding to begin the job of cutting the honeycomb out without harming the bees. As I cut out the combs, I handed them to Gabe who cut them down to fit into special frames that will hold them in place until the bees can fix them up right. What didn't fit into the frames, Gabe put into a large plastic bucket to feed back to the bees later. You can see the bees begin to gather at the very top of their new home to signal to the others that 'this is now the place to land'!

Gabe headed down to the ground and we handed down the large plastic bucket filled with honeycomb that didn't fit into the hive. Pete & I put the siding back onto the house & Pete used a very low powered bee vac to suck the remaining bees into a wire mesh cage without harming them. When we were done, we lowered the new hive of bees down & cut of a nice piece of wild honeycomb for Kathy to eat....YUMMY!
Gabe called Gary Strickland to tell him of our success & set up our next cut-out in Altizer on Wednesday. Thanks to the Ferguson family for calling us to save the bees instead of an exterminator to spray them. Thanks to Kathy Seelinger for giving us the history of the house & the bees. And thanks to Pete & Gabe for a real fun time...