Weekly Winners this week features a bee removal at my house. The bees had been noticed, but it wasn’t until they decided to make the garage their home too that something had to be done. This was one of the coolest things to watch.

The Weekly Winners is the great idea of Lotus at Sarcastic Mom – click on her for the original weekly winners post, and to see more great weekly winners!

Getting to the bees…

The colony, exposed. As a side note, this is also right under my bedroom, and right about where my bed (and my head) is.

Looking up into the combs – the cleaner looking ones on the right are the freshly made honey combs.

Now, if someone had ripped away a wall of my home, I think I’d be pissed…they weren’t phased. (And yes, I have a zoom lens.)

Time for the removal. Our bee man took a shop vac type contraption and vacumed the bees up, into a box.

Then, once he had a fair amount vacumed up, he went in and cut the combs out.

If there were any bees still clinging on to the comb, he vacumed those up as well.

He saved this comb for me – see the two outlets, almost like coral? This is the comb that is used to create the Queen.

The cut out combs…this is about a medium sized trash can.

Fresh comb, complete with honey inside…

He estimated we had between 30,000 and 40,000 bees.

When all was done, he had ripped out the section of the house to get at the bees, cleaned out the entire colony, put baking soda down to absorb honey smell (honey can turn bad and stink), replaced the section of the house, stuffed the holes they originally got in through with steel wool, and caulked the crap out of the house. Then he dumped the comb, but took all the bees that he vacumed to a beekeeper, so the keeper could care for the honey bees.

Seriously awesome to see.

Thanks for visiting!