It’s a long story, but I’ll make it short. I have had a hive of honey bees living in my house. Not in areas where you could see them, just hear them: in the ceiling above the bathroom and below my daughter’s bedroom floor. Yesterday, Bee Keepers came to my house to remove the hive. It was really really interesting. You can see the section of ceiling cut out- about 12×24 inches. The bees are being vacuumed up by a bee vacuum. Can you see part of the comb on the left?

This is a close-up of the comb in the ceiling. Lewis and Geneva (from Greenstone Gardens) said it was a very large hive and had likely been there for several months. It took several hours to remove everything. The bees were carefully vacuumed. When enough bees were gone, Lewis and Geneva started to remove the pieces of comb. Sections of comb with honey were put in a large clean bucket. Any sections that had brood (comb with eggs or babies) were saved so they could be relocated and start a new hive. The process of vacuuming and removing comb went back and forth over and over again.

Lewis is showing my daughter one of the four sections he saved. She liked seeing the capped cells and knowing the bees would be okay and live somewhere else. (Wouldn’t it have been something if she were holding Pooh instead of Eeyore?). The bees that were vacuumed were placed in a bee box with the brood that was saved.

About half of a five gallon bucket was filled with honeycomb. We bottled a bunch. I’ve never had fresh-from-the-hive honey before: it was amazing. I plan on giving the bears some Thursday when I scoop-poop- I’ll try to get photos of that too.

If you want to learn more about bee keeping you can go to the Orange County Beekeepers Association website. If you want to see more photos from my experience, including the sounds of the bees, let me know by leaving me a message in the “comment” section below, or click here and let me know.