In June of this year (2023) we were contacted by Martin O Rourke from the Louth bee keeper’s association about a honey bee removal in Blackrock, Co Louth. After getting in touch with the home owner Geraldine, we got a brief history of the colony. The bees had moved in two years previous and since then had swarmed serval times. She had contacted serval bee keepers during this time but they had still not been successfully removed.
I visited the house and removed a few roof tiles to get a scope of the size of the colony. Straight away I could tell it was immense. I outlined what we would need to do and that she would have to get a roofer to repair the felt after the removal was complete and the straggling bees had dissipated. At that time of the year, it wasn’t great weather to open up the roof so we had to wait a few weeks for the weather to pick up before we could plan it in.
On the 30th of June we arrived to do the removal. We could gain access to the colony using a ladder and removing the roof tiles. To start, we needed to find the back of the comb they built. As you can see from the pictures, we ended up seven tiles back which was around 6ft into the roof. The bees had started building from the front and because of the steep pitch of the roof the comb at the back was at least 5ft deep. As always, we slowly started removing the brood comb first, trying not to touch the comb with honey stores. For our vac box we used brood comb with eggs and larvae from the colony to make up frames. These frame together with drawn frames and stores made up their new home.
With the vac box built we set about sucking up the bees and removing the comb piece by piece. It was a long slow process but we were able to remove everything and pull the majority of the bees into their new ready-built home. The removal took most of the day. We removed many buckets of comb and honey from the roof space. Established colonies of this size can be particularly aggressive when being removed and this was no exception.
Because of the amount of time this colony had occupied the house, it would have been impossible to mask or remove every trace of them. The timbers and the concrete blocks had been completely covered and impregnated with wax and propolis. To prevent another swarm, passing the area, from choosing this spot as their new home, we filled the whole space with expanding foam. After the space was filled, we put the tiles back on temporarily. A professional roofer was needed to remove the tiles again and repair the felt to make the roof fully water tight once the straggling bees had dissipated.
Since the removal, Geraldine contacted us again because a large number of bees were flying around the same spot. This is a common result of having a colony removed from a house. The spot they were removed from was filled with expanding foam and there was no way of them making a home there, but the smell is still attracting them to that area. There is nothing stopping them starting a new colony in a different part of the same roof. Through the LBKA we were able to organise a bait box to be set up to try and trap any swarms contemplating this idea. Thankfully this time that wasn’t the case but Geraldine will need a bait box set up for the next few swarming seasons just in case.
Big thanks to Geraldine and Martin for getting in touch with us to save this colony of essential pollinators and Liam from LBKA for setting up the bait box afterwards. Special thanks to Kali for taking the brunt of the bees’ aggression by getting stung multiple times in the face.
To learn more about honey bee removals visit our services page Honey Bee Removal
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