Removals (x2)

"I am reading through this contract, and the way I read it, you will not replace the work that you tear out.  Am I reading that right?"

It is a fair question.  A fair thing to ask.  Mr. Victor Robinson has a tenant who was looking to have bees removed from his back porch, and I had gone over for an inspection and had discovered two separate hives - one on each level of the condo.  I had modified the contract accordingly and emailed it to him.

"Sir, I am a bee removal specialist," I explained.  "I am not a specialist in construction.  To be perfectly honest, as much as I don't want to be your carpenter, the truth is, you do not want me to be your construction specialist.  Jack-leg does not even begin to cover it."

"When Mr. Ervin did it last year, he replaced the boards and closed it up."

Sid Ervin is a legend hereabouts, and with good reason.  He did amazing work all across the state, opening up buildings with an absolute minimum of fuss, removed the bees that he could, poisoning the bees that remained, sealing up the hole, and leaving.  He earned his money; he was good at the work, and there was quite a demand.

But I had just finished a job where I drilled into plaster, and was (am) still working on a job that involved brick.  Recent experience has already shown me my limitations in a painful way.  It was a critical moment for a critical question. "If it is as simple as tacking a board back in place, I will do that.  But anything beyond that is beyond my carpentry skills."

We agreed, and I received the contract by email later that day.  And Monday, I gathered all of the items that I thought I would need and drove an hour over to Brandon Mississippi, to remove bees.

According to Charles Smith (I had a moment of panic when I was told that his name was Charles Smith, since that was also the name of my LAST job - I worried that I had gotten the name wrong on my first ever invoice....), the bees had appeared a little over a week earlier, and just completely covered the porch.  It was a very large swarm, and within a day, they had disappeared.  Into the column.

With a week's growth, I figured it was a good time to do the removal.  The bees would have had little time to build the comb, and it would not be terribly messy with only limited brood and comb.

I was wrong.  Very wrong.  Holy honeypot, the amount of work bees can do in a week when they are motivated is astounding.

Pure uncapped honey from the first step of opening the hive.

The only time I had watched bees begin to build a hive was at my house from the swarm collected from Drummond St., between the house of Launo Moore and Jill and Tony Bishop.  So I though I knew how fast the girls would build comb.

These girls swarmed just as the flowers were blooming, and there were resources.  It was also a much larger swarm, and they got busy.

I opened the top of the column, and immediately had honey to collect.  I went inside and snagged a small tupperware piece from the kitchen counter, salvaged some of the honey, and covered it for sharing.  With people, not with bees.  They can fend for themselves.

Opening the column.

Kathe had sent me on my previous removal mission with a set of barbecue tongs, and I found them enormously helpful in holding the comb in place with a minimum of damage.  My previous experience at the house in Vicksburg left me a little scarred on how much damage I had done to the brood comb, and I did not want to repeat the mistakes.  I was pleased with how they worked.  I might even use the tongs/spatula combo I have in the drawer for future removals.

The comb came out cleanly, with a minimum of fuss.  The latex gloves I wore kept tearing, and were discarded quickly, but all in all they served well.  Stings were lifted off the skin, and swelling fingers kept to a minimum (my ring mentioned in a previous entry still has not been repaired.)

Ollie, ollie, oxen free!

But I got the comb.  And the bees.  They were not happy about the situation, but that is not an expected outcome anyway.  Once I had removed the majority of the bees, I opened the side of the (square) column, and removed the rest, while providing remaining bees a chance to congregate at the central location.  I did not find the queen, but played an intense game of hide-and-seek for several hours, trying to figure out which section of the hive she was under, which board she was hiding behind, or what disguise she was wearing (I'm just a normal bee, nothing but a worker bee.....).  She also (quite cleverly) dressed up 8,000 of her closest relatives to look just like her.

Come out, come out, wherever you are...

And, yes, I am still tinkering with the vacuum.  The draw is too strong, and many of the bees are damaged in the process, so I am trying to use the beevac as infrequently as possible.

But the job is to remove the bees, so when I have removed as many as I can by other methods (singing to them, playing the fife, etc), I am pretty much left to remove them by sucking them into the vortex.  By far my greatest draw is to put comb into the bucket, and let them move to protect the comb.

Light, delicious honeycomb.

The comb was almost preternaturally bright.  This was not old comb - Charles was right that they were newly occupying the space - the comb was less than two weeks old.  And already they were drawing honey - light, sweet honey.

Once I had cleared the space up top, I moved to the lower level, where I removed the fascia board to reveal....

...more wood.

A bit anticlimactic.  I had hoped to hear the roar of unhappy bees, preparing to do battle.  Instead, I heard the thrum of bees going about their business: dehydrating nectar, stashing pollen, caring for brood.  From behind another layer of 2x6 #2 spruce.

After poking and prodding for a bit to see what could be removed, I finally succeeded in removing a horizontal piece, revealing bees back and to the side.  A very defensible position, the scout bees explained to me, as they offered to demonstrate the ways in which they were willing to make my life more difficult.

Piece by piece, standing 13' off the ground on an aluminum ladder, I removed pieces of the hive until all the new comb was gone.  Much like the other hive, these bees were a recent arrival.  Lots of new, fresh comb with both larvae and light honey ready to be capped with a wax cover, eggs, and bright pollen filling cell after cell.

After I had safely removed the comb (and, honestly, feeling a little proud about how well I was doing) I dropped back down to re-evaluate.

Not much of an opening.

Truthfully, being on a ladder, the phrase 'pride goeth before a fall' occurred to me more than once.  But everything up until this point had been pretty solid.

I grabbed the flashlight and looked into the hole.  To my surprise, an awful lot of bees looked back at me.  From very far back in the cavity.  I started reaching further back into the hole, making a bunch of bees very worried in the process, and I kept cutting comb.  But this was not bright, white, or even yellow comb.  This was old, dark comb.  There were no eggs, pollen or honey in any of these pieces.  These pieces of comb were left from last year's removal.  And maybe before that.

I was reaching to the maximum extent my arm could reach, deep into the hole.  And as much as I was extracting, there was more.  This hive had extended deep into the area between the ceiling and the floor.  And with every new patch of dark comb, more bees emerged.

I vacuumed again, and pulled out everything I could.  Finishing up with a wipe down of the entire surface with ammonia (and the burst of escapee-bees in hiding that always seems to accompany that action), I then went to finish the job.

And be a carpenter.  How hard can it be?  I am not terribly handy, but surely I can put things back into the place I took them out of, and tack them back into place.

Of course, nothing fit back into the original space.  I used a crowbar to force the column pieces back into place.  I tacked, and caulked, and sprayed with a vile insecticide expanding foam sealer that I am still finding attached to my skin and my clothes in the most inexplicable places.

And after an hour of work, I had the column put back together.

A quick vacuum of the stray bees, and I went to work on the fascia for the lower hive.

Again, nothing fit.  Nothing.  Finally managed to cinch the horizontal piece back in place, together with the replacement duct tape and screen wire to secure the holes.  And again, I caulked and sprayed foam to seal holes.  As the foam would dry, I would run the vacuum again, to get more of the stray bees away.

Finally, after about ten hours of work on the ladder, I gave it up.  I could not put the fascia board back in place, but I swept up the debris and explained the next steps to the tenant (and later in an email to the owner).  After a week:

• Trim the foam.  
• Replace the fascia board.  
• Caulk and paint to reduce the risk of return.

I shared the honey, and left.

All in all, not bad.  I took the bees and comb by a friend who keeps bees, and set him up with two potential hives, all ready for him to raise.  And made it home in time for a laaate dinner that Kathe had prepared.

About a dozen stings, including a surprise one on the belly at the end of the day.  But being able to complete the job, and share both bees and honey....

It feels good.

On to the next job.

Bees Inside

Bee-tween
the window and the drapes.

I love bees.  Bees are a delightful part of nature.

But. 

Nature, I am told, is intended to remain outside the walls of our homes.  To establish our safe haven within a location of our choosing, we beat back the weeds and the animals and the insects, and we sanitize and create our space to our own desires.

Our space. 

Very rarely are bees expected to be part of that space. And certainly, any situation where bees have unfettered access to that space is to be avoided.

Last week I got a message.

Facebook message from Mr. Smith's sister, Portia

Bees.  Inside.

As my sister said, "Nope."

The house is beautiful.  It is made to look like the limestone that faces the buildings at the front of the Tulane campus, and has a lovely feature (tower? keep? machicolations? I don't know.) on the southeast side of the house. When the owners got in touch with me, they referred to the house as The Castle House.  Originally from Vicksburg, they had purchased the house as a family home, eventually to be passed on to their granddaughter.

And there are bees inside the house.

Nope.

So my job was to remove the bees from a beautiful, turn-of-the-century home.  My goal was to remove them safely, get the queen ensconced in a new hive, and bring enough of her loyal subjects and resources to get the hive started in a new place where they could thrive.

My job has been done.  The bees are no longer in the house.

Bees entering from the base of the window.

I did NOT, however, reach my goal.

The whole job was a learning experience, and there were a host of unknowns from the start.  How far down did the bees go?  How far up?  Which studs defined the limits of their space?  How were they getting into the house?  

The first piece that provided a difficulty was the shape of the room.  Yes, the room the bees decided to inhabit was a circular room.  The plaster work for the room was done at a time - back in the early 1900s - when work in plaster was a common craft.  

Nowadays, to find a good plaster guy, you will pay big.

My first schematic.
The bee bag got drawn into the hose
at the bottom, clogging it.

I promised Mr. Smith that I would cut as little as possible to remove the bees.  My first step was to drill a hole in the wall, allowing the bees a specific place to escape.  I would use my beevac to suck them up.

Now Best Beloved, my beevac needed some tinkering.  On a different job, the suction completely disappeared, while I was up on a 30' ladder.  Situation: less than ideal.  So with the help of my inventor-brother Parker, I modified the design so that I could draw the bees through the hose and into the bucket/bag combination.

Parker's suggestion was to add a tube at the bottom, and perforate it, so that there were more than one place for the vacuum to draw.  It was similar to the design I had originally used - before the introduction of the paint-strainer-as-bee-bag.

The draw, as a result of his suggestion, was vastly improved.  

I drilled holes in the wall of the upstairs room in The Castle House, and the bees began to emerge.  Because I was working inside, I could not use the smoke to calm them down - there is something about bedsheets and mattresses and smoke that don't mix.

So I beevacked.  Slowly, the numbers of curious bees started to abate, and I cut the hole open wider.  The opening ended up being about 18" high by 12" wide - enough to get my gloved hand in with the vacuum, but not much room for maneuvering. 

And there were bees downstairs as well, which meant that it was possible that the hive extended below the floor and into the wall on the first floor - a big uncertainty that I needed to deal with eventually.  But first, I had to start removing the comb.  

The first bit of comb I encountered was old, abandoned comb - the bees had gone lower in the wall since they had built that first piece.  To get the comb out easily, I was going to have to expand.

Discussions with Mr. Smith did not get far.  I wanted to cut through the base board precisely, to expose more of the comb so I could remove it carefully. I do understand his response ("No.") because replacing it would be tough, no matter how careful I was.  I used to work for a company that manufactured molding.  Curved molding is an expensive product.

Below the sill, above the baseboard, between the studs.

I also floated the idea of opening the wall downstairs, if the hive extended that far.  That was also met with a negative response.  Again, understandable.  The replacement of plaster on one opening in one room on the second floor is expensive, but doable.  The downstairs room, though, is pretty much the centerpiece of the home.  "Crorey, if the bees extend down that far, we will just have to fill them in; I can't open the wall downstairs."

I continued to remove comb.  At first, all of the comb was empty, with no honey or brood or pollen.  As I got lower, there was brood.  And as carefully as I tried to extract it, I bruised all of the comb as it was coming out, damaging larvae and pupae as I did so.  

Meanwhile, the vacuum continued to do its work. 

At one point, I left the beevac running, with the hose in the wall, and went downstairs for a glass of water.  When I returned, the hose had fallen out of the wall, and there were a large number of bees that had wandered up to investigate the new situation.

Veil up selfie.  The way it should be.

I ran over to the hole, and began vacuuming them up, and they reacted predictably.

Ow.  OW.  OWW!

It was at this point that I decided to pull the veil back over over my head.  Something I should have done BEFORE I approached the bees, but in my haste to prevent a bee jailbreak, I forgot.  Nose, scalp, scalp.  Not bad, considering, but a definite reminder to slow down and then react, rather than react first, and then think....

I continued to remove comb, encountering a nail in the wall that limited my access, and eventually encountering a floorboard that extended into the wall space, as well.  Each piece of comb removed was preceded by multiple attempts to remove the bees into the beevac.  

Old, disused comb.

Another 18" of removed comb.  Nail between wall and siding.

Nail removed, more comb removed, revealing floor board obstruction.

Comb.  Sadly, I was not able to remove the brood comb intact. 

Beneath the floorboard was the best brood comb I encountered.  Removing it required that I reach under the floorboard, grasp the comb, break it free, and then snake it out through the opening between the wall, stud, siding, and floorboard.  All while wearing a glove to ensure that I got stung the fewest times possible.

Eventually I had to remove the glove, and dive into that space barehanded, to retrieve the comb.

The comb extended to the ceiling of the first floor, where I hit a hard surface.  The rest of the afternoon was spent removing the fragments of comb from different crevices across the opening.    

Closed up the hole, vacuumed up debris, and ready to go.

Once all of the comb was removed, I wiped all the interior surfaces down with ammonia.  Several bees who had hidden in different places in the hole suddenly erupted into the room, more than a little upset at having been gassed out of their game of hide-and-seek.  After consigning them to the interior of the bee vac, I sealed the inside corner with foam sealer, closed up the hole, and vacuumed up the remaining plaster and wood, dead bees and comb from the room.

I then took the vacuumed bees home, and placed them in a hive box.  I never saw the queen, and suspect that she was KIA.  I remain very conflicted about removal that does not net the queen, because it means I still have a lot to learn.  

I finalized the process by climbing up to seal the exterior with silicone.  And the job was done. 

The job was done.  But the goal still remains.  I want to do better.  I want to improve the bee vac to make it gentler on the bees.  I want to take my time and find the queen, so that I can complete the task and introduce the bees to a new home.

Mr. Smith wore my spare veil while I transferred bees from vac to bucket.