Beekeeping Colony from Church Soffit

Description

June 24th, 2014

NWNJBA Beekeepers Bob Kloss, Kevin Inglin, and Daniel Inglin took on a removal from a Church Soffit in Lambertville NJ.

The size of the hive was extensive and it a about 4 hours in total but the team worked in harmony to get the job done and rescue the bees. It is not often you get to see that much natural comb and it would be very interesting to know how long it was in there. Some of it was very new but some looked real old.

Ideally we’ll do our best to keep this stock going. We’re hoping we got the queen and will do all we can to propagate this ‘presumed feral’ stock.

One lesson learned was about the comb. Wish we had some more time to manage it better and we could have used it to do splits or make more hives if we would have known what we were facing. We’ll anticipate that for next time.

Maybe it shows but this was the first time that the three of us did anything remotely like this; we were going there to remove a cluster hanging from the building after seeing the photos for 2013 and surprised ourselves when we dug in and did the extraction job.