Beehive Removal: Tijeras, NM
I’d like to share with you an experience I had removing a beehive in Tijeras, New Mexico. I received a phone call one afternoon from a general contractor who was doing some major renovations on a home.
During their renovations, they found some honey bees and needed them removed. Knowing how important bees are to the environment, the general contractor did a search on the web, found our Albuquerque Bee Removal website, and arranged a time to meet.
When I arrived at the site, I was led to the back of the house where I noticed a significant number of bees entering and leaving near the roof. I immediately suspected that honey bees had made a hive in the eave of the house because that’s a common place for them to do it.
The only problem was that this was a two-story house and getting to them was going to be a challenge. Fortunately, there was some scaffolding at the house that I was permitted to use.
After getting the scaffolding arranged and getting all my gear situated, I carefully removed the wood on the underside of the eave to expose the hive.
I immediately observed a large amount of comb which told me that they had been there a while. The one thing that surprised me was that there wasn’t a lot of honey bees present. I began to do a thorough assessment of the health of the colony as I removed the bees and comb.
Upon extracting the first few rows of comb, I noticed that there was very little brood being raised. Typically, I would expect to see bees in all stages of development (eggs, larva, and capped brood), but there was only a tiny section of comb that had any.
This was an early indication that this colony didn’t have a queen bee or that she wasn't producing. Queen bees have a natural life span that can range anywhere from one to three years. When they die (or shortly before they die), the worker bees raise up a new queen so that they colony can continue to survive.
As I removed the comb (honey comb and brood comb), I attached it to frames in my bee hive with rubber bands. This was a time consuming process, but it was necessary to give the bees something familiar in their new home.
After I finished removing all the comb, I had not found the queen. In the end, I concluded that this was a colony in decline.
If we had left it alone, it would have died out in a few weeks all on its own. Nevertheless, I took the bees back to my apiary and merged them into another one of my bee hives.
Bee hive removals are always such a joy to perform. I’m looking forward to the next one!
