Westover and Sons, Apiaries

Here is the question: If you take several stings over a short period of time, will it desensitize your body to bee stings? Apparently many people say it does and many people do it, but I have never done it myself. I have always tried to avoid being stung by the honey bees because I am averse to pain and itching. I therefore normally suit up in protective clothing and wear a hat, veil, and gloves as well as either a bee suit or at least long sleeve shirt and long pants. Some times it is good to put a rubber band around pants cuffs too so the bees don’t crawl up your pants and sting you on the leg somewhere. I decided that the only way to find out for myself if I can desensitize myself to bee stings is to try it and see how it works, hence my decision to do so.

Apparently getting stung in one place does not necessarily affect the pain or reaction of getting stung in a different place on my body. I took a sting (full dose of venom from a guard bee taken from the front of the bee hive) to the middle of the back of my left hand this morning, and it was (at least it seemed) much more painful than the sting to my arm last week. There is also noticeable swelling and tightness in my skin. It has been a couple of hours so the pain is not so bad now, but the swelling and redness are also very apparent. I guess 3 stings are not yet enough for desensitization. It’s a good thing I did not take a sting my right hand as well this morning (as I had initially planned to do) because I have a lot of work to do today.

I added a couple of pictures to show the progress of the sting aftermath. Yesterday evening I was almost having regrets that I took the sting. This morning it is subsiding, but still quite swollen. It feels better and I will be interested to see what happens at the next “experiment.” If I wanted to get my wedding ring off right now, I would have to have it cut off, and I had to loosen my watch band a couple of notches to get it to fit my wrist.

I will be going to visit and work with a commercial beekeeper in about a month for hands-on working and training on how to successfully keep bees alive and manage them without any chemical or unnatural additions to the hives or bees. Part of my goal is to gain knowledge and confirmation that it can be done (this person does not experience colony collapse disorder with their honey bees), and I will be free to ask any question I want about beekeeping (I assume). Another part is to gain practical experience and learn through doing, and a third part is to learn through my experience whether or not I would ever want to try and become a commercial beekeeper take make a living (maybe after I retire from other work when I can no longer work as a teacher due to mandatory retirement age or some other reason). One of my life’s goals is to keep on working my entire life doing something, and maybe it will be as a beekeeper. I will want to find out what equipment I would need to be able to do it the most efficiently and cost effectively as well as all the work that is involved in it that I may not yet be aware of since I have up until now only practiced beekeeping as a hobby endeavor.

Having read about preparing for an upcoming season of beekeeping, and also comments by people who have had reactions to bee stings, I decided that I need to start right now to desensitize myself to stings in order to be prepared for my upcoming trip. Even though I hate pain and normally do whatever I can to avoid being stung, I understand that if I am not allergic to bee venom or hypersensitive (in which case I could go into anaphylaxis and die from a sting), I should be able to desensitize myself by receiving stings over a time period, and then my reactions to stings should be minimal. Having determined that and made my decision, yesterday I committed myself to intentionally take a sting.

Since my left elbow has been bothering me, I decided to intentionally get stung in the muscle right above my left elbow. After opening the hives and looking at the bees and checking on their progress, I closed them back up and then took a pair of tweezers and grabbed a bee from the front of the gentler give. It was frantically trying to escape and I could see it extending and retracting its stinger multiple times from its abdomen. I steeled myself and put it on my arm above the elbow to let it sting. As I released the bee, it flew away, leaving the sting apparatus embedded in my arm. I watched as the sting muscle undulated and pumped the toxin into my arm. I decided to take the full dose, so patiently waited until all the toxin was injected.

By the way, getting stung intentionally for medical purposes is known as apitherapy, and many people practice it and many patients pay to have it done. It is said that beekeepers don’t get arthritis or rheumatism because of the effect of bee stings, and many maladies have been treated by apitherapy. Historically it is said that King Charlemagne was cured of his gout by apitherapy in the 8th century.

The first reaction I had to the sting was a small raised welt on my arm, much like a mosquito bite. The pain was not so bad. It hurt somewhat, but not that badly. After some time had passed, the histamine reaction spread out into the surrounding skin with swelling and some redness, but the pain was still not bad. I thought to myself that this was not going to be bad at all, but by the end of the day, the muscle in my lower forearm became very swollen, tight and sensitive and the reaction had spread completely through my elbow and halfway to my wrist. As I rode my bicycle home from work, it was somewhat painful, but the pain was a rather dull ache–not a sharp pain except when the bicycle hit a bump. After sleeping for a night, it felt a little better, but then riding my bicycle to work again (it takes about an hour), the ache and tenderness has returned, so it feels about the same as it did yesterday evening.

My plan is to wait until my symptoms resolve themselves and then get stung again at least once a week (or more often if I recover faster) until I leave for my trip. I don’t want to arrive there and get stung while working with the bees and have it disable me so I can’t work. I also want to not be afraid of getting stung so if I do get stung I can just ignore it and keep working. My immediate goal is to desensitize myself to bee stings before leaving on my trip, and hopefully at the same time to take care of a few aches and pains I have been experiencing for the last couple of years.

Checking on the roof this morning I saw one lone single solitary honey bee that looked like it was lost and could not find the hive that I moved last Friday night. That was good news.

We are still in the monsoon season, so it is overcast and there is a light rain right now. When I checked the hives that had been moved, there was no entrance activity this morning to speak of. I also saw a large centipede on the ground in front of one of the hives.

I have included some photographs of the new hive locations.

Last Saturday I removed the small hive box (third box) from the top of the hive with which I had combined it. I brushed all the bees off into the top box of the two-story hive after moving two frames of brood up from the bottom box. The bees had not started using the middle box yet. I moved empty frames of foundation down into the bottom box to replace the ones I moved up. After I brushed them off the frames, the bees really filled the air around where we were standing, but none of them stung us or acted agressive. They are really gentle bees. I also saw a queen in the small top box, yet did not know whether that was the only queen there or if there was another queen in the bottom box as well. My friend, Teruo Shiki (the hives are at his house), told me that after I left there were quite a few dead bees in front of the hive, so I assume the reason the second (middle) box was not used at all was that the top queen stayed in the top box and the bottom queen stayed in the bottom box. Since they each had a separate entrance they could use, they just stayed as two separate colonies. When I checked them today, a lot of the second box is now filled with honey and brood and there is good progress being made.

Also last Saturday, we harvested the honey from the small box. The method was crush and strain, and we got about a gallon of honey, which we put into jars. The color is light and the flavor is very mild. It is delicious.

Yesterday (Friday) evening I moved two hives of native Japanese honey bees from the roof of the building where they had been down under some trees into shady areas. Hopefully they will do better and not overheat even if it gets very hot this summer. I haven’t decided whether or not to also move the third hive as well. It is much heavier and will be more difficult to move. It also has more ventilation so may be all right even if left on the roof. I will need to think about the logistics of how to move it.

This morning I removed the “bad comb” from the second hive at Shiki-san’s house and combined all the bees down into one box. Very few of the frames in the bottom box had been built out, and even after combining the bees, they did not fill even half of the bottom box, so I think it was the right thing to do. The frames and combs in the top box were not spaced properly and some of the combs had additional combs built hanging off the face of the first comb, so this box needed to be phased out. Not much of the honey was capped, so the amount we were able to bottle was limited (maybe a quart and a half). The rest was nectar (uncured honey that still has a high water content). We got about a half gallon of the uncured honey, mixed with pollen. I put it into the refrigerator so it won’t ferment or spoil. We will probably use it for cooking and bread making.

This past week I recombined the two hives that I split previously. I had split them because they looked to me as though they were getting ready to swarm and had made queen cells. I split them so they would not swarm, and then allowed the queenless part of each split to raise a new queen.

After doing that successfully, I recombined them so they would be bigger hives, past the swarming impulse, and maybe do very well and store a lot of honey this year. I decided to “let the bees decide” which queen to keep, whether the new queen or the old queen, or whether to keep both queens and grow even bigger faster.

What I think has happened (or probably will happen) is that they will end up keeping the new queen.

In one of the hives, I moved the “super” (the top box where I found the queen) to the bottom, put a queen excluder on top of it to keep her down there, and moved the box that was on the bottom up to the top above the excluder. I will let all the brood in the box I moved to the top emerge and let the bees fill that box with honey, which I will then harvest. That box on top is the one with the misshapen comb spaced too far apart and has cross comb (comb across more than one frame) and burr comb and some frames that have an extra comb hanging off the face of the main comb. It is a real mess. These frames are non-standard home-made frames too, so they will be removed and not reused, and the wax will be melted, filtered and reused for either making candles or something for the hives. After that I will add a standard sized box with standard sized frames for them to either continue expanding the brood nest or to store honey.

On the second hive, I put the small box on top of the two large boxes. The bees in the small box were very calm and it appears that they have a new queen. That is also now recombined with the original hive it was split from. That means there will be two queens in that hive at least temporarily. Again, the bees will decide what to do about that. I did, though, not think it through completely so made a mistake. I should have put a piece of newspaper between the hives so it would take them some time to get used to each other and share each other’s pheromones and not fight. I neglected to do that, so there was some fighting and some dead bees as a result, but I don’t think it will be too bad. I don’t think too many bees will be lost. Regardless, it’s already done and nothing I can do to go back and do it over again, so I just have to accept whatever the result is.

Today is a somewhat rainy day (light rain) here in Fukuoka. Since it is Saturday and I had time, I visited the western honey bee hives at Teruo Shiki’s house. Teruo san was picking ume (Japanese plums used to make pickled/dried plums–umeboshi) from the tree in his yard. He had lots of ume this year, probably due to all the honey bee hives around it.

After my greetings, the first thing I did was to open and look at the bees in every hive (there are 4 of them) to see the conditions. The smallest nucleus hive (with 4 frames) is doing fine but although healthy and active, the colony is very small yet. That is my original “shook swarm” hive. The hive it came out of has a new queen and the brood pattern is good in it, although I did not see the new queen. Teruo told me that he has seen it.

The next one I checked was the one I shook and split most recently, not knowing which part of the split had the queen in it, I added one frame with fresh eggs on it from the original hive into the shook part so they could raise a queen if the queen happened to be in the other part. I pulled that frame out to look at it and found no queen cells, so I deduce that the old queen is in this hive. I am quite sure that is the case, because when I then opened the original hive (which at the time of splitting had one capped queen cell in it), that hive now had about 10 or more capped queen cells in it. That is pretty strong evidence that the queen is in the other hive.

I decided to combine the two hives that I had split originally back into one, so I wired foundation into 6 more frames and used them to fill out a super to which I added the nucleus colony from the 4 frame nucleus hive, and then put that super on top of the original hive from which it was split. There are a couple or several possible outcomes to this manipulation. First is that “the bees will decide” which queen they want to keep. Another is that the mother and daughter queen may both stay in the hive together, cooperating and both laying eggs until the original mother is superceded by her daughter. I suppose there is also the possiblility of a swarm issuing from the hive, but I think that is less likely since it now has two actively laying queens (at least as of the time I combined them. It is possible that with the two queen scenario, the hive population could “explode” and I will have to make sure I add enough empty space to it so they can store a lot of honey. That is my hope for it, but I will check it in a week to see how it looks. I have heard from experienced beekeepers (Dee Lusby) that many old time beekeepers performed this manipulation for this purpose and often it was very successful. Regardless, my hope is that I will end up with one large healthy hive from these two that were about to swarm before I split them.

My plan for this hive is to move it into my largest equipment and for it to become the biggest and most productive hive. The original part of the hive is a homemade hive body with non-standard frames that are spaced incorrectly, I plan to move that equipment out completely in the end. Ultimately I will put it above a queen excluder until all the brood emerges and the bees then fill it with honey, then harvest the honey and remove it completely. In the meantime I will need to prepare more equipment (supers and frames) to accomodate the growing colony. One more note on this one: I noticed one or two queen cells in the old part of the hive, even though it has a new queen in it, so I moved an empty comb into the middle of the brood nest to give her more room to lay in. These bees may be thinking about swarming again. The old queen is in the super on top with her nucleus colony right now, surrounded by 6 empty frames with 4.9 foundation. I will check it again in a week if the weather is good and decide what to do and when to do it. Before knowing what I do now about possibilities, I would probably have removed and killed one of the queens myself, but I decided to let the bees do what they think is best instead. We shall see what happens.

What good is knowledge if you don’t apply it? Since I’ve learned more about how to attract honey bee swarms using bait hives and swarm lures, I decided to try it while there might still be some swarms coming out. I got some help from Oshige san (Shoichi Ito’s secretary). I asked her to help me find a store in Fukuoka that sells essential oils–specifically lemongrass essential oil. She did the internet search on her computer (in Japanese) and found a store in Tenjin (the business district of Fukuoka). I stopped by there on the way home from my office and found the store and they had what I was looking for. I bought 3 ml of lemongrass essential oil for 630 yen (about $6.30 USD).

Also on my way home I stopped at Teruo Shiki’s house and picked up my top bar hive that I had been keeping there and brought it home on the back of my bicycle. I put a couple of drops of lemongrass oil on the end of a Q-tip, snipped off the end with a pair of scissors, and stapled my “lure” to the inside bottom of one of the center top bars. I also dabbed some honey on the inside wall of the hive box. This hive box has had bees in it before, so it should have some “bee smell” in it already. Lemongrass oil contains geraniol and citral, two components of the honey bees’ Nasanov gland pheromone used for orientation. Many people have reported success attracting swarms when using it in their bait hives.

I haven’t seen any honey bees in the local area around where I live this year, but there may possibly be some. I wanted to put a bait hive out at the Ito Campus of Kyushi University because I see a lot of western honey bees working the white clover every time I go there, but it takes time and is difficult to do something like that on a college campus because administrators and staff are concerned about danger and liability (I suppose) and it requires official approval to be able to do it. I might put one on the veranda of one of the students who lives in the freshman dormitory on campus there since I would then only need to have his permission. I would go and pick it up right away if a swarm moves in. I’m still thinking about whether to do that or not, but leaning toward doing it. I might pursue getting permission to put another one in a better location while already placing one on his veranda. He lives on the 7th floor of a 10 story building. Every apartment has an outdoor veranda, and there is only one person per apartment.

So much for now.

Yesterday I visited a western honey bee hive on the Hakozaki Campus that is being kept by a female Taiwanese graduate student and she happened to ride up on her bicycle at the same time I arrived, so I was able to talk to her about her bees. She is doing greenhouse pollination (ecology) studies with dandelions and honey bees as pollinators. I offered to give her advice on keeping her bees healthy if she was interested. She does not seem to have much experience beekeeping.

I told her that I had noticed that the bees she had last year had died out and that she had a new hive now. I asked her where she got them from and how much they had cost. She told me she bought them from Kurume (a company I know about and have visited) and they had cost over 30,000 yen (that’s over $300 USD). That seems an awfully steep price to me but maybe that’s what they cost these days in Japan. She said that in Taiwan bees are less expensive. After they get the Spring honey crop there, they don’t need them any more (so she says) and so they sell them cheaply.

I took her over to the hive box where last year’s bees had died and opened it and showed and explained to her that the frames were spaced much too far apart and that the reason the bees died is probably because they were not able to cluster enough to keep warm during the winter. It was not until I tried to move the frames closer to one another that I noticed that they had all been nailed down into the rabbet so they could not be moved and that was the reason I was unable to slide them. As I think about it now, they were probably shipped that way originally so they would not shift around during transit and then never moved again after arriving here. She had been feeding them white sugar and what looked like an artificial pollen substitute too, and that is another reason to believe that they did not survive. I understand that white sugar and white sugar syrup will shorten bees’ lives.

I told her that if she was interested, I would be happy to look at her bees and give her advice on how to keep them healthy, but I would not do anything to them without discussing it with her first. She seemed to be interested in my offer, so I told her I would look at the new hive when I had time.

Today I decided to go take a look at them–to at least take the top cover off and check the frame spacing. I took my protective gear with me and when I tried to open the hive, I could not get the cover to budge, even prying it up with the hive tool. Finally I noticed that the top was nailed shut on either end, and I could not get the nails out using my hive tool, so I returned to my office to retrieve a claw hammer and returned to the hive once again. After removing the nails, I still could not get the lid to move. I thought it might be because of the rain and the wood might be swollen and stuck and hard to move. I finally got it to move a little bit and after quite some exertion I was able to raise the lid far enough to get a little peak inside. It was then that I could see the combs seemed to all be attached to the lid and that was why it was so hard to get off. I quickly put it back down (it was starting to rain harder now) and packed up my gear to leave.

While walking back to my office trying to make sense of what I had seen and experienced, it came to me that this hive probably came shipped just that way, all nailed shut, and she just opened the front entrance after it arrived, setting it out where it is now, but had not done anything else. I don’t know whether I might find some frames inside, nailed down too, and maybe just on one side, so the bees then built comb hanging from the lid in the open space. That is what I am guessing right now, but I don’t want to do anything else until I talk to her again and ask a few more questions. If she really wants to keep them healthy, it will take more hands on work than she has given it so far. She has been feeding them honey and pollen so they have built up.

It is going to be a real mess to get it into a workable condition, but I have some ideas on how to do it successfully. It’s too bad that I could not have become involved sooner and a lot of this mess could have been avoided. Part of me says, though, that it might be just as well to leave it alone and let it stay a non-movable single box hive that cannot be expanded or examined. Anyway, I will talk to her and tell her what I think her options are and what I would do if I were her. I should have thought to get her phone number and email address when I saw her yesterday, but I did not. I’ll have to watch for her or leave her a note.

On Saturday, May 25, here in Fukuoka, Japan, I checked the bees in the hive I am trying to convert to small cell. To explain, during the past 100 years, honey bees have been “upsized” by various beekeepers and scientists who believed that a larger bee would produce more honey and make them more money. European honey bees that were raised in the U.S. and Europe before this time were smaller, and reared their brood on comb where the cell size that they reared their larvae in was between 4.7 and 4.9 millimeters in diameter. The producers of wax foundation kept gradually increasing the diameter of the preprinted foundation cell pattern until it is the current industry standard of 5.4 millimeters. Those who currently keep their bees on cells that are 4.9 millimeters in diameter or smaller report that they do not need to use any chemicals or treatments to control mites or other secondary diseases or problems, and their winter losses are minimal. I decided to see if I can get the western honey bees at my friend’s house downsized to the 4.9 size foundation.

The first thing I did was to create a “shook swarm” into a hive with frames all with 4.9 foundation. Although low in numbers, that hive is doing well and raising new bees now and drawing out their cells the correct size.

The hive I shook them out of was highly populated and had worker bees of mixed sizes and mixed colors, some dark and some light, so I thought I might be successful in doing the shook swarm. I left the orginal hive in the original location, but found the queen and moved her and as many workers as I could shake off the frames into the new hive with the 4.9 foundation. The original hive was a homemade hive with homemade non-standard size frames, and the spacing of the frames and combs was not good, so the bees were not building up very well and in some places were building a second comb hanging off the first comb on the same frame. They were also raising queen cells, so it looked like they were getting ready to swarm. When I looked at them yesterday, all the queen cells there had been there were torn down and although I did not see the new queen, I assume that there is one because I finally found a small patch of new brood (young larvae and eggs) about the diameter of a grapefruit on one comb. I’m still thinking about what steps I want to take next.

The other hive (which was orignally much smaller and only had a few bees and a queen in it) I had previously transferred into a smaller Langstroth style hive made for Japanese honey bees (with frames with 4.9 foundation), and transferred some of the combs from the original hive into it by cutting them down so they would fit into this smaller hive. I also spaced them closer to the spacing I felt they should have to build smaller cells. I soon noticed that they were reworking the small cell foundation into larger sized cells and not using the 4.9 pattern like I wanted them to. On the other hand, the queen was laying very well and the hive population was growing quickly. I took a rectangular piece of plywood that was the right size for the base of a larger standard size Langstroth hive and cut a hole in the center of it so it would fit over the top of the smaller box and I could put a larger box on top filled with frames with 4.9 foundation. These bees have done exceptionally well and entirely filled the small box and expanded up into the larger box above.

I wanted to find the queen in this hive and move her into the box above and then put a queen excluder between the boxes so the queen would only lay in the box I wanted to move the entire colony into and then I would let the brood in the lower box all emerge and then remove that box from the hive, replacing it with another large box–no longer using the smaller box. Yesterday when I checked them, I was unable to find the queen so I changed my plan. What I did was to move all the bees and frames from the large super into a large bottom box (the hives in Japan have a bottom box with a fixed bottom that cannot be removed) and put it in the location of the original hive. Previously the large super had been on top and the small box on the bottom. I then set the small box aside and went through it carefully frame by frame looking for the queen. I still could not find her (and the bee population is very high with lots of drones, making it very difficult to locate her). I went through all the frames again one by one and still could not find her the second time either, although I did find a capped queen cell and several other queen cups that looked like they were in the process of raising a new queen. It also looked like the bees had backfilled the brood nest with nectar/honey and were in the process of getting ready to swarm, so I decided to make a split.

I left the large box (which already had several combs drawn and being filled with honey and pollen) in the original location and shook and brushed more bees into it (the top was off). I did not use any smoke and the bees were calm and gentle, and when shook into the hive, they did not fly up and try to get back on the comb or into the other box. I shook bees (hopefully most of them were young nurse bees) from several frames with capped brood on them into the large hive and found one small frame in the small box that had small larvae and eggs in it and screwed it into the center of a top bar and placed it into the center of the large hive box in the orignal location, being careful to have all my frames in Housel position. If the queen is in the large box, then everything should be fine. There is a frame of brood coming along and the queen can keep laying. If she is still in the small box, then the bees in the large box can raise a new queen from one of the newly laid eggs or newly hatched larvae. I can check in a week or two and will be able to tell the situation immediately.

I then moved the small box with the capped queen cell already in it into a new location. If the old queen is there, then I will let the bees decide whether they want to keep the old queen or let a new queen supercede her. Most of the capped brood is in this hive, so although the population of adult worker bees is now very small compared to the hive it was split from, there will soon be many new workers emerging and that will not be a problem. It is as though the hive already swarmed. I will be able to tell from what happens in the hive in the original location what the situation is in the small box and then decide what to do there next too. I might end up placing the small hive box back on top of the big hive with a queen excluder between them to combine them. I would not have split them if I had been able to find the queen. So right now I have the potential of ending up with four hives with four laying queens, but I intend to combine and consolidate them back into just two hives if I can find the queens and get them where I want them. I can then get rid of the bad comb and bad frames and boxes and get them all onto small cell foundation, which is my goal. The frames/combs in the small cell boxes are also spaced closer together than the current industry standard. They are at 1-1/4 inches apart which also makes for a tighter brood nest. That is another reason I think the bees in the small box are doing so well.

Next, I went to my office on the Hakozaki campus of Kyushu University and looked at the hives of native Japanese honey bees that I have on the roof of the building. I pulled some frames to look at them. I observed larvae and eggs on the frame I looked at. The bees really did not like to be disturbed, and ran like crazy to the bottom of the frame, and flew off. They were not calm at all, but were really wild, buzzing lound noises and running here and their, shaking their abdomens and threatening me like they would a hornet. It is easy to see how flighty they are and how much more likely they might be to abscond than the European honey bees I was working with this morning. The difference was like night and day.

Finally, I went and looked at a hive of European honey bees that someone else on campus is keeping. The hive they had at the end of last year has died out, and a new hive they established superficially seems to be doing all right. I opened the deadout and could see clearly that the frames were spaced much too far apart, and they tried to feed them with white sugar and pollen substitute. That is probably why they did not survive. They could not cluster to keep warm because the combs were too far apart.

My western bees that are going gangbusters have not been fed anything this year–only what they have found themselves to eat. Another philosophy of the small cell organic beekeepers is to not put anything unnatural into the hive. If the bees need honey to keep from starving, then give them real honey and not sugar syrup. They also need real pollen for the best health. I will report again in a week or two about what I find out and decide to do next with the western honey bees (that is what European honey bees are called in Japan), as well as what I am able to do about moving my native Japanese honey bees off of the hot roof into a shady location where it is cooler. I want to get that done before it really heats up this summer. The monsoon rains are supposed to start in a few days here. They will last about a month and then real summer will be here.

We got a call today at the university about a swarm of bees. They said that the bees had already been sprayed and there was a big pile of dead bees, but there were survivors and they wanted to know if we were interested in saving those. My first reaction to that news was to respond to them that next time please call before spraying instead of after, and we will gladly come and remove them, solve their problem, and save all the bees. In other words I responded negatively, but I had mixed feelings. I half wanted to go and try to save them.

I then posted an email to the Organic Beekeepers List and asked the question, “Is it worth going to pick them up?” One person responded and said that he had been called about a swarm that had been sprayed with wasp and hornet spray and had picked them up, they recovered and did very well, and he was now making a split from them. I then decided to change my mind and see if I could get them.

We tried calling before we left (the location was a large apartment complex near the airport) to see if the bees were still there, but the person did not answer the phone, so I decided to go anyway. We had been told that they would dispose of them after 2:00 p.m., so we hurried to arrive before that time. We got there at 1:45 p.m. and found out that they had just finished vacuuming up the rest of the bees right before we got there, so it was a wasted effort. At least I tried.