New Bee-Extracting Method

The last post was apicture of us taking a wild colony from a barn wall cavity. It would have been a much easier experience if we had had our new piece of equipment which we tried out earlier this week!

We'd heard about people using a hoover to literally suck up bees before, but had never tried it. So when Dad got a call about a swarm in the roof of someone's 200-year-old originally-tiled bay window, he hopped onto the internet and knocked up this contraption out of a brewing bucket!

We took it round to the swarm on Wednesday and it worked really well. We found that using the lowest suck worked perfectly - it sucked the bees up without hurting them. In the end we couldn't get the whole colony - inside the roof was a maze of nooks and crannies and even home to an old wasp nest - but it's nice to know that the bee hoover works and we have thought about how to make better use of it next time. But for a first attempt - it worked really well!