"What do you tell them later
that summer, when 50 pounds of honey start dripping thru the drywall 
and other
pests start showing up for a meal?"

The method I usually use, and am doing so at the moment in the corn 
store of an ancient water mill not a furlong from where I'm sat, is to 
set up an adapted nuc box against their entrance so the bees have to 
fly through it. Then, when they've got used to that, I put the lid on 
so they have to fly through the 'proper' entrance. Then, when they've 
got used to that, I put a couple of Porter escapes on their exit from 
the wall and put a couple of combs in the nuc.  They bees can't get 
back in with food and fluids.

Theoretically the queen should go off lay fairly soon as there is no 
income and their stores are 'hard tack' with nothing to dilute them.  
The current lot of bees are escape artists and I keep having to re-fix 
duct tape to stop them getting back home; then a couple of days ago I 
used expanding foam and yesterday I cut bits of sponge to fit into more 
tiny gaps where they were queueing to get in.  I added a comb of older 
brood from a hive yesterday to give the something to focus on and put 
some homely pheromones on the outside of the wall.

  Generally (bees do nothing invariably) the queen comes out after a 
couple of weeks and resumes laying.  That's when I remove the Porter 
escapes and replace them with a piece of queen excluder to enable the 
workers to re-enter their old home and rob it out, thus avoiding the 
problem referred to above.

I tell the owner of the property to expect the process to take 6 
weeks,but usually it is rather faster than that.

Chris

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