A while back I requested information on a first time experience for me
- removing bees from a wall cavity.
 
Well, armed with bits and pieces of information from Bee-L and lot's
of patience (ended up taking me a little over four hours from start to
finish), I recovered a very strong hive from inside a farm house wall.
The hive, in a 16 inch (41cm), on-center, stud cavity, 4 inches (10cm)
deep, was over seven feet (213cm) from top to bottom and composed of
6-7 rows of comb.  For anyone who cares to make a guess at how long
they had been in there . . . there was a good 24 inches (61cm) of
detritus below the hive.  
 
Here are some things I did during the removal and subsequent
installation.  Any suggestions or advice welcome . . .
 
I cut pieces of comb to frame height and rubber banded 3-5 pieces side
by side on bare frames (wire only).  Recovered about four frames of
brood/pollen/honey this way and added three or four frames of honey in
comb.  I placed them in a hive body with bottom board I carried into
the room.  The frames with rubber banded comb worked great till the
girls chewed through the rubber bands and started tossing them out.
Frame manipulation a few days later resulted in some of the comb
tilting off the frames because it was attached to nothing else or had
become bridged to another frame.  I totally removed some of the honey
bearing comb, moved the wild brood comb to the outside of the brood
chamber and placed frames from my original brood chamber in the center
of the new brood chamber.
 
I vacuumed the bees into my bee-vacuum as I went along.  Tried to just
run the vacuum when I was needing to suck bees, as opposed to running
it non-stop.  I was pleasantly surprised at the low numbers of dead
bees when I installed them in the hive.
 
As I mentioned before, total removal, from ripping the lathe and
plaster on either side of the occupied stud cavity, removal of all the
lathe and plaster, removal of all the comb and bees and cleaning up
took about four and a half hours.
 
I lost my hive to varroa this winter, so had a boxes full of stores
for the wild bunch.
 
Questions:
 
Did I kill none/some/all of the brood by placing them in the hive body
with few bees in it?  They probably sat that way anywhere from 45
minutes to two hours.  Room temperature was probably in the mid-70's.
For transport home I stapled screen over the top and the entrance and
put them in the back of my van, which was comfortably warm.  When I
got home I put the body in place, dumped the bees out of the bucket,
installed apistan and buttoned up.
 
  I eventually want to get the wild comb out of the hive because it
doesn't quite meet Langstroth specifications.  <grin>  I'm going to
have horrible bridging comb!  Depending on answers to my first
question . . . will the queen start laying in the nice, neat brood
comb and stop laying on the wild brood comb that I moved to the
outside?  Am I going to just have to sacrifice any remaining brood in
the wild comb so I can get proper frames placed in the box?  Have I
totally screwed things up in my hive?
 
Do I need to worry about them becoming honey bound?  The second box is
a full deep with ten frames packed pretty solid with honey.  There was
considerable space in the brood comb, but still a quite a bit of honey
and pollen.  I guess I can't put a super on it until the apistan comes
out.  The super I do have is all foundation, without any pulled comb.
 
I haven't really been able to look for the queen with the frames in
the state they are in . . . Depending on suggestions for handling the
frames with wild comb . . . should I requeen now whether I find her or
not?  Wait to requeen in the fall if I do find her?  Are these bees
likely to be varroa resistant since they have survived all this time
and will this be lost by requeening?
 
I got a call from the farmer the day after I removed the bees.  He had
a cluster of bees about 6 inches (15cm) in diameter that were hanging
inside a window frame.  I'm sure many of these are field bees that
came in after I absconded with their hive.  Because they were all
clustered together, does that mean the queen was in the cluster or
would they tend to do that anyway?  I recovered most of those by
misting them with water,  brushing them into a copy paper box with a
feather, then took them home and placed them in the hive.
 
Well, that's about all for now . . . any help gratefully appreciated.
 
 
John Taylor
Southeast Missouri
Wild Rose Creek Apiary