Busy after my move back to Texas from Japan

Since returning to Texas from Japan, my youngest son and I have split two hives, melted beeswax and dipped foundation sheets, milled about 50 4.9 small cell foundation sheets from our own wax using our own foundation mill, trimmed and mounted them into frames and installed some of them in hives. Yesterday we got a swarm call and successfully collected the bees and installed them on honey super cell frames with a queen excluder on the bottom.

We have made tops and bottoms and put together precut boxes that were purchased previously. It’s hard work, but my son is a hard worker so things are going well. Today we went out and cut out a feral colony from a dead tree. My son got stung around 20 times (he was running the chainsaw), but it was a successful removal and we saved brood comb, using rubber bands to hold them into the frames. We also used a plastic bucket bee vac in the removal. At first the bees were very defensive, but as we progressed, they became less and less defensive and more demoralized as we took apart their nest and reconfigured it in a hive box.

We are now seriously implementing the things learned from this list and Dee, working hard, and busy as bees.

Layne Westover
South Central, Texas (formerly of Fukuoka, Japan)

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2 Responses to Busy after my move back to Texas from Japan

  1. Dear Mr. Westover,

    We live in College Station and we have been trying to learn about bees, while failing spectacularly more than three times with a top bar design.

    We have two highly successful feral colonies in our oak trees and we suspect that two of our failed top bar swarms have integrated into these colonies. This is becoming frustrating. They seem very happy without us. And they have made our garden lovely, and yes, we are sure we are helping the environment…..but we would love some honey.

    Would you be willing to show us how to change our luck?

    Mark and Shelly

  2. anwestover says:

    This is Arthur, Layne’s son. Hard to know why your top bar hives failed w/o more information. Layne has kept top bar hives in the past, but he has gotten away from with no intentions of returning to it. He has been busy settling in after moving back to Texas, if he has time later, he will be in contact.

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