So one of my buddies has a hollowed out dead tree on his property that has a bee hive. He asked me if I know of anyone who could remove it. My son's father in law has put bees on my property to help pollenate all my peach trees, so I called him and sent him some pictures of it. So Saturday we went over and set the process into action. He put some fine wire mesh over the holes in the tree and took care to staple the mesh all the way around the hole. Then cut a whole in the mesh and put in a funnel for them inside to exit. The funnel will allow the bees to escape, but they just can't find a way to re-enter. Its sort of like a minnow trap set up. So this will take a week or more, the theory goes like this, once the workers all leave and then start building their new hive, the queen will eventually come out looking for her workers and then she will go into the new hive. He baited the new box hive and set it next to it. At the end of the day the bees had mostly exited, but were just hanging out near the tree and not going into the new boxed home, so the bee-keeper came back out Sunday and opened up the box and scraped a few hundred bees into the top of the box and that has started the migration.

Day before start

Day 1

End of Day 1

Day 2

I was surprised at how docile the bees were while he stapled the wire mesh up, only bee that landed on any of us while we stood no more than 4 feet away

Day 3

man
yall have it going on

That’s cool David!
Thanks for sharing!

Day 4

I had an issue with bees similar to yours, called around and found a guy who does that. He ended up spending almost five days removing bees from three trees with giant knotholes, I was amazed how many bees were actually in there. The best part is he did it for free!!!

Very good chance a guy like that is in business renting hives to farmers to pollinate crops.

This Bee Keeper is an Architect and does it all for the honey. He's been to our deer lease out near Abilene to remove a hive from below one of our doublewides before we moved it off, and has had hives on my property for about 10 years.

Day 5

Day 6 - they are just about all now going to the new box