Honey Bee Cutout From A Lead Domed Tower
This was a great location and a really interesting job with the opportunity of being able to see the craftsmanship involved in the construction of the domed lead roof.
We didn’t really know what to expect when we arrived or how we were going to access the honey bee colony. Ideally if we had had time we would liked to have used a trapout, but the time was not available and everyone involved with the reparations were happy that they could make good whatever we needed to dismantle.
So first thing was to pull of a lead section, then some battens so we could see what was going on. After that it was just more of the same – the honey comb was jammed into all the tight difficult access points and we had to play chase to eventually catch the queen.
On completion we had the queen, the bees and all the honey comb out. So all that was required was for someone to put it all back together, and seal of any possible entrance points as the dome was going to be giving off some very strong enticing odours to any passing honey bees on a warm day. Thankfully not our job, but in hind site I wish we had been more involved in the reparations and allowed to check it over on completion.
For the your interest, you may have observed in the image which shows the exposed comb white to grey clusters located on the wooden structure; this is the remnats left behind by Wax Moth larvae a wee beastie that beekeepers loath. Something we had to carefully monitor for when we took the bees back to our offsite isolation apiary.
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If you are looking for more info on bee removals from unusual places check The Hive Blog and search for “unusual bee removals”. For the removal of bees from chimneys try starting with our article Removing bees in a chimney, for information on bee removal and relocation from roofs you may want to look at our page Honey bees in roof, or if you have bees in a wall our page Honey bees in wall maybe of use.
