LA Backwards Beekeeper Roberta writes:
I got a call from Sherry today after her neighbor noticed that there were bees coming out of her shed. She called me immediately as she was scared but she didn’t want them exterminated. I tried to email a couple people on the “Need Bees” list and the first person I heard from was on vacation in Kenya!
I hadn't heard from anyone else right away so I started to worry that I'd have bees on my hands and nowhere to put them. Well, OK, I only waited an hour. Then just to be safe I listed the bees on the Backwards Beekeepers Yahoo group and I got 10 emails in a couple of hours! Boy are people eager to get bees this time of year. There just aren’t enough bees right now to go around.
Luckily Jeanine and Kevin saw that it was just a couple of blocks down the street from them and contacted me. They had just started beekeeping this winter with a swarm that started to build some comb but couldn’t make it through the cold spells.
They checked out the situation since they were so close and let me know they wanted to do it tonight. It was a little bigger then I expected. It took up 9 frames and the hive looked beautiful. There was a perfect laying pattern with tight brood and just a couple of open cells. Jeanine and Kevin did all the work of cutting out the hive and seemed liked pros.
They had the comb tied in, bees scooped up and into the hive in less than a couple of hours and the bees were off to their house in the back of their truck. They said the cut out was more extreme then the swarm they had rescued but definitely worth it.
Hope this is the start of more bee calls!!
—roberta
