Busy honey bees

As a lot of you will be aware the honey bees are very active at the moment and busy swarming.
But sadly we haven’t been getting many calls from people with swarms. Guess most people are calling the BBKA (British Beekeepers Association).
As we are local beekeepers as well as pest controllers for Cardiff this is a bit disappointing for us, as we actively strive to increase the numbers of honey bees in the countryside.

We collect honey bee swarms free of charge in and around our area, and bring them on thru the year so that they can hopefully be successful colonies next year.

Unfortunately we do need to charge for the removal of colonies once they have taken up residence. There is a lot of skill and work involved in successfully removing and relocating a bee colony.
There are a few different ways of doing it; it may involve removing a section of the soffit, siding panels, ceiling, roof or brickwork.
Or it may be possible to get rid of the bees slowly over a duration of a few weeks, sometimes encouraging them into a nuc box for relocation or just reducing their numbers and stores until they leave.
What must be considered if someone intends to use an insecticide is that it is necessary to block all access to the hive shortly after it has been treated. There are many reasons for this, two good ones are;

• once a bee hive has been killed of any passing bees attracted to the smell of honey will investigate and because there is no defensive bees to protect the hive they will take back toxic honey to their hive and let the other workers from that hive know where the honey has come from. These workers will then remove as much toxic honey as they can to take back to their hive before they die out, and so the process is repeated again and again.
• the robbing out of the honey may well lead to toxic honey entering the human food supply

Additional problems with using an insecticide on a honey bee colony are that it will result in a toxic mess of dead bees, rotting larvae and unprocessed honey, which can then produce unpleasant smells or leach thru the ceiling or walls leaving opportunity for secondary infestation of flies, ants, clothes moth, carpet beetles and rodents. Even if it does not occur immediately the leaching may occur further down the road once wax moths have located the hive laid their eggs and the larva after which the wax moth will destroy the comb that is holding the honey stores.

Honey bee removal is a bit of a speciality that we are very knowledgeable about, so its probably worth your time calling us if you need to remove them and you are in or around Cardiff, South Wales.