# Did a nice cutout yesterday (28 year old hive), but it may need some help. Any tips?



## westernbeekeeper (May 2, 2012)

Hello all,
I was called out to a place in town where a man had a hive of bees nesting in his garage ceiling. He has lived at this place for 34 years, and he said that they have been there for the last 28 years. I started to open up the ceiling and soon saw that they had comb between the ceiling joists for about 5 feet; so they had just one row of beautifully straight combs that were 18 inches wide and 8 inches deep, which was the perfect size for wiring into deep frames. The bees were very gentle; I did most of the cutout with no protective clothing. I got about 30-40 deep frames of good comb, about 15 with a beautiful brood pattern, around 10 with honey, and the rest were empty. I vacuumed the bees out, and got about 2 pounds, maybe more, of bees. The "icing on the cake" was the fact that on the second to last comb, I found a large beautiful queen and was able to catch, mark, and cage her. I hived the bees that evening on their own comb. I kinda checked on them just a few hours ago, and they seemed sort of sluggish and disorganized, but I did see the queen, apparently as healthy as ever. Does anyone have any tips for getting them going as soon as possible? I do want to breed some queens from this hive because of the survivor qualities and gentleness. I will also mention that I found absolutely no evidence of mites or disease in this hive. So anyway, any input? Thanks in advance!


----------



## 100 td (Apr 3, 2011)

Lucky lucky you! With such a big nest, as a relatively new beek, I would split the brood and eggs into three and make up three new hives and let the bees make a new queen in 2 of the new hives. This way you get to keep the original queen, and get 2 new queen raised for the other 2 hives. Alternatively you could do some grafting (Ben Harden method) and grow some queen cells and then split into 4 or 5 hives and give them an emerging queencell. Good luck!


----------



## Nantom670 (Jul 29, 2011)

If all you got was 2 lbs of bees I doubt that will be enough to cover a split, hardly enough to cover the brood that you have. I would keep it as one hive and be glad of getting the one.


----------



## Mr.Beeman (May 19, 2012)

Let them do their thing. They will get back at it soon enough. 2 lbs isn't much at all for that size hive. Build this one up and do splits next year.


----------



## westernbeekeeper (May 2, 2012)

Hello everyone,
Here is a sad update on this cutout. I went to check on it, and they were not taking any syrup and there was no syrup/nectar in hive. The bee numbers seemed to be steadily dwindling, and then I noticed what looked like foulbrood scales in the cells. It did not smell abnormal, but it looked just like EFB. I didn't want to mess with any foulbrood since all my hives are disease free up to this point. I burned the frames, combs, and bees and fired/scorched the rest of the hive equipment. Kinda disappointing, but I really did not want to mess with any diseases.

However, a week ago I got a call for some bees in a porch ceiling/balcony floor. I went and lifted the floor of the balcony, and there was a nice nest of honeybees there. All the comb was brand new, pure white or light yellow. It had about the equivalent of 1 deep and 1 medium of comb. There was very health brood in the majority of the comb, and a bit of honey too. The guy said it was a swarm that moved in there about two months before. I found the queen, a nice fat long healthy black one, on the third comb in; I caged her and continued working. I was using my bee vac. Anyway, all in all, I got 7 pounds of bees (a healthy colony!), ten pounds of honey (I gave most of it to the homeowner), and seven awesome-looking combs of brood. I check on them this morning and they'll be ready for a second deep next week. So this beautiful cutout well made up for the last one! Any tips for this one? I guess I have done all or most types of cutouts now: one from a tree, one from a wall, one from a ceiling, and one from a floor. How about that?  I'm sure that there are more cutout situations out there that I have not done yet. I love doing cutouts. This one only took me about 45 minutes. When I bid a cutout job, should I add the cost of putting things back together? So far nobody has wanted me to fix everything back up.


----------



## westernbeekeeper (May 2, 2012)

I think the queen is a Carniolan. She's very black, and I also noticed on the edges of her thorax, there is the very faint outline of a blue dot. The paint has worn off. Mustuv been a domestic at some point it time.


----------



## Riskybizz (Mar 12, 2010)

How does a feral colony of bees maintain its existence for 28 years with EFB, and how are your determining how many pounds of bees your capturing? Cutouts are best left alone without being disturbed for at least two weeks to allow them to organize and adjust to their new environment, especially if you know you captured the queen.


----------



## westernbeekeeper (May 2, 2012)

Don't know how it survived that long. I am not sure that it was EFB, it just looked unhealthy so I dumped it. I got rid of them two and a half weeks after the cutout, and I wasn't seeing hardly any eggs. There also was only a handful of bees left in the hive. I had the queen marked, and she looked good, but the rest of the hive did not. 
As far as pounds of bees, my bee vac cage weighs 1 3/4 pounds; so I just weigh the whole thing after the cutout, and subtract 1 3/4 lbs from the total weight, and that's how much you have.


----------

