Bees come to Town!!

To those of you who follow my blog I must say "And now for something completely different"

Earlier this week my next door neighbour pointed out that we had a Honey Bee Swarm on our front garden wall.  It was about the size of a bowler hat (this was how Sue, the wife measured it, not that she or I have a bowler hat).  The local council said they would pass problem on to Environment, haven't heard anything yet, Sue said she would search the web!
Searching for Bee Swarm removal, amongst the winners of the list was Pickford Removal Company and a number of well known removers, fine if we were for house removals.  She had Amazon offering best prices for buying Bee Swarms, I don't think so.  Getting better was a company who would come to your home and remove a Bee Swarm for nothing, problem there was that they were in Las Vegas.
Anyway she didn't give up and after going round and round in circles she finally spoke to a bee keeper about 30 miles away who told her about swarms, he said that the Queen bee might decide that the wall wasn't suitable and move on or she might not.  He could take it away but would need to charge for the journey and fuel.  After more circular travelling around on the Web she found another Bee keeper who said he would be right over.
Thereby lies a tale when John arrived.
He was pleased that they were not high up and started the task to remove them which I was amazed to see.

John set about the removal by this time loads of people were arriving to look, at a safe distance of course. He simply removed the nest into a box without any protective clothing using a cut down plastic milk bottle and a feather so that he didn't damage the bees. Estimate of about 40,000 bees in the nest.

Next he inverted the box onto a sheet with the queen inside.

I thought the next bit was classic, he placed his wallet between the box and the ground to allow the female workers to enter and be with the queen.

I have since been told from a friend Bob (a Bee Keeper) that the Original Hive was neglected and the bees swarmed due to overcrowding in the hive and should have been checked in an eight day cycle.
Anyway back to John as he donned his protective gear and carefully cleaned off the rest of the bees from the wall and put them on the sheet so that they could get to the queen going past Johns wallet.

Out came the smoke to make the last few docile, as you can see they were getting a bit agitated by then flying around John, the wall and the box until after about 40 minutes it was time to leave.

John had by then removed his suit and calmly picked up the box and tied it up and placed it in the back if his car.

Well I could go on for ages but it sparked an interest in me to learn more. I spent a long time talking to Bob the friend this evening that we could not contact at the time about bee keeping and the effect on the environment and our food which I found very interesting.

If any of you would like to know more, go to Bob's web site

Thanks for looking.

Best regards, Mike