Today, June 9, Thursday, I removed a colony of Japanese honey bees from the wall of a building on the Hakozaki Campus, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan. There were several people helping me do it.
The bees and their nest were in the wall cavity of the building. A couple of the physical facilities men helped cut the siding and take it off. I lent them each a veil to use. I started out by smoking the bees through the entrance hole. It was really not that big a deal. They gentled right down after the smoke.
I tried to tie pieces of brood comb to top bars, but that did not work well because the material I was using was not strong enough. I finally ended up just stacking the comb vertically with pieces of twigs between to hold them apart. I hope that works. I also found the queen on the next to last comb and brushed her into the hive box before putting the top bars back on and closing it up. It’s going to take quite a while for the bees to reorient to the new box and start using it. I hope it turns out to be successful. I do not want to even go back and look at the mess for a day or two because I think it will just make me feel discouraged because it is such a mess. What is going to happen is what will happen, and I just have to wait for things to sort themselves out and hope that they do.
When I got back to the office, I gave everybody here in the department a small piece of honeycomb to try, faculty and graduate students. I received many compliments for the small samples I gave them.
