Reminds me of when a honeybee swarm occupied the parking lot behind our building and eventually mostly settled on a bike rack (this also happens to be the building of the downtown Palo Alto Philz). As a beekeeper, I was so excited that I emailed our head of ops and physical security in all caps asking if I could have them. After he called me to confirm that I wasn't trolling, he graciously offered to stand guard to keep folks away while I grabbed my bee suit to safely remove the bees and put them in a new home.

I remember that incident well and watching you comb the bees into their new home. Good times!

Beautiful

Yes! 100% call local beekeepers when possible for an almost always free removal. A beekeeper will sometimes even PAY you so they can come move the hive.

No such luck with wasp and hornet nests though. Had to pay to have one of those removed from the siding in our house. And wow were they mad when the beekeeper started vacuuming them up.

Got talking to the guy for a while, fascinating industry. He's very nervous about the next 20 years when it comes to honeybees.

In the past there were companies that would take a hornet hive for free. They'd drop it into a nitrogen filled container and sell the hornets for medical research

My memory is fuzzy on the details but that's the gist of it

What about carpenter bees? I've seen a lot of those around lately and have been thinking about checking the roof. Do they have the same value as honey bees?

Yes! Carpenter bees are just as important as honey bees. While they don't create honey like honey bees do these carpenter bees are vital for pollination.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_bee#Ecological_signi...

Carpenter bees are awesome, they pollinate flowers (so we can have fruits in our backyard) and have an awesome short life of minding their own business.

They also have a voracious appetite for Georgia Pine which happens to be the material my inlaws summer home is made from. Not to be outdone, woodpeckers also enjoy eating a carpenter bee and their babies, so we end up with holes from the carpenter bees along with a string of holes made by woodpeckers in search of said bees.

Im not really too worried about being stung by them, and I agree they generally dont want to mess with you unless you are actively messing with their burrow. I have taken to putting out sacrificial 2x4s each season that I pre-drill(3/4" holes seem to do the trick) to attract the bees to easier pickings. This helps quite a bit, but I still have to end up spraying a few holes in our siding and deck each year as it will soon be swiss cheese if I do not...

So you live inside a vegan art installation?

A couple years ago I relocated a piece of driftwood from my small backyard to the front yard because a carpenter bee couple had taken up residence in it and the male was routinely dive-bombing us in the backyard (they don't sting, but are just aggressive).

I was amazed to see that the male kept returning to the same spot for what seemed like weeks looking for its partner in the now relocated piece of driftwood. I naively had expected it to track down the piece of driftwood just 40 ft away in the front yard, and it was kind of heartbreaking to see it searching for it in desperation.

Sort of. We had carpenter bees in our deck one summer and they were incredibly agitated and aggressive whenever we tried to use it.

It is illegal to kill bees in certain situations in California. An exterminator might refer you to a beekeeper just to avoid any potential liability.

There are situations where beekeepers may not actually want to capture the hive. Like dangerous ladder work when the have is on a second or third story and only accessible from the outside.

I luckily haven’t needed to deal with this, but I do know of people who’ve “thought” they had a “honey bee” problem, but the exterminator came out and confirmed it was a “wasp” problem.

This is an area where the intent of the law is good, but sometimes the real world issues of safety of acquiring the hive is complex enough that it’s not safe to attempt, and it’s not clear the law allows for that.

(And it’s not just CA that makes it illegal to kill bees, many states have similar laws)

My dad and sisters are beekeepers. They run around all year to capture swarms. First, they try to capture the queen and mark her, then keep her extra safe in a special cage. Then they have a "bee vacuum" which is basically a shop vac hooked up to a bucket, both with a really low flow rate to avoid injuring the creatures. Most of the time, it's an entertaining process and the bees are as gentle as flies.

> They run around all year to capture swarms.

There may be a difference in certain regions, but usually swarms are a spring thing, with another small reoccurrence in autumn. Mid summer is quiet and winter has none.

This relates to the times at which a queen can mate - there are no male drones in winter (the females kicked them out!) and so any queen that hatched would be a virgin, and couldn’t lay.

Sometimes swarms will occur due to bees absconding to get away from High levels of disease. I have never seen this but high levels of varroa can cause it.

The ones in the "off seasons" are usually very aggressive from what I've heard. They typically ran away from home to break away from some environmental stress I've been told? I'm not a beekeeper :) Just repeating what I've heard

This must be somewhere warms and with very mild winters?

NZ is lucky to have fairly easy going bees - this doesn’t mean that they are all friendly, just that Africanised bees are so much worse. There are accounts of them flying into smokers and putting them out. It’s all rather intense.

Kansas in the midwest. Depends on what you mean by "Mild" haha. We had snow in October, followed weeks later by 90degf temps. Very wide swings.

Our friends had a bee swarm show up in one of their trees this summer after a big storm. Their neighbor happens to do beekeeping, so he came over and helped them set up a hive for the swarm.

I think they still have the bees. Haven't heard much about it lately.

Can you elaborate on "most of the time"?

I recommend watching Jeff Horchoff on YouTube. He is very polite and his bee removal videos are oddly calming. I've been subscribed for a year or two now.

https://youtube.com/c/JeffHorchoff

Finding a hive that can survive the winter can be a multi-year event (at least for me it was). The hive which ended up surviving came from a captured swarm

What was the cause of the deaths?

Here is usually varroa - I’m just contemplating getting my autumn treatments in, as the little horrors are actually visible on frames now. I hate them so much.

They didn't save enough honey for the winter. One year they barely survived and a week later the queen was found decapitated in the then-abandoned hive. Bees are hardcore

The information about there being directories and how to handle it is amazing.

Thank you for sharing. I’m filing this away in case I ever have to deal with an infestation.

I was thinking more along the lines of a pivot for the business into a new line of AI Honey.

how much is a beekeeper compared to an exterminator?

I knew a beekeeper that would take them off peoples property for free since they could typically sell them or home them themselves - win win. I don’t think that is uncommon.

Here in NZ, the beekeeper is free. They may reject the job though, as cutouts of colonies are horrible.

Beekeeper is generally free. Exterminator pricing varies based on locality and scale of the job.

Some beekeepers in competitive localities will pay to come remove your hive.

I called a local apiary to remove a wasp nest in the Seattle area. They charged a flat $200 for wasps, and $0 for bees.