HONEY BEEHIVE... BE GONE!
"Unique among all God's creatures, only the honeybee improves the environment and preys not on any other species."~ Royden Brown
For the past 3 years Honeybees made my house as they home without permission. No concerned with the neighbours since the bees mind they own (honey) business.
Lately a few darker spots show up in my dining-room ceiling. Concerned, I called a exterminator last week. By looking at the ceiling, told me that expected to be closer to 200 lb of honey between floors.
This morning Mr. Gerry Daverne, from Pest Solution Inc. arrived with an Assistant to start cleaning up the mess.
1. First (left) entrance to the old beehive
2. Second entrance to the hive to the right
3. Dark spots in the dining-room ceiling
4. Exterminators - Pest Solutions - arrived
5. Mr. Gerry Daverne fumigates the hive to kill the bees
6. Bees start getting confused
7. His assistant proceeds to vacuum the bees
8. Bees get trapped in the vaccum cleaner
9. First ceiling cut
10. Fist handfull of honey combs
11. Bees in distress
12. Fumigatting again
13. Proceeding to cut the second whole.
14. The dead bees and comb taken by the hand full.
15. Honeycomb pieces and dead bees on the plastic math
16. Second bucket of the honeycomb
17. New honeycombs - probably the young ones from this year
18 - First and older honeycombs
19. Cutting the third whole
20. Fumigating the last bash of bees
21. Forth and last ceiling cut
22. Third bucket with the oldest honeycomb
23. Three buckets of honeycombs
24. Not many bees left, only the ones coming from the fields
25. Spraying the walls, preventing the bees from reentring
26. The forth pale of honey(combs), estimated at over 110 lb.
27. Mr. G. Daverne cleaning up - the job is done.
28. The leftovers attached to the ceiling
29. Another site where the honeycombs used to be
30. The older combs... How neat/straight the rows
31. Where the newer combs used to be attached...
32. Honey drippings will continued for a few days
33. Buckets catching the leftover honey
34. In the end... not a small bill!
I feel sad that the bees, specially the "Queen" bee, couldn't be save, since there is a shortage of bees in the province or even in Canada. As for at least the 120 pounds of honey couldn't be saved either due contamination.
"If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live?" ~ Albert Einstein
Facts about bees: http://www.ontariobee.com/index.php?action=display&cat=38
Honey bees as a group appear to have their centre of origin in South and South East Asia (including the Philippines), as all but one of the extant species are native to that region.
Most species have historically been cultured or at least exploited for honey and beeswax by humans indigenous to their native ranges. Only two of these species have been truly domesticated, one (Apis mellifera) at least since the time of the building of the Egyptian pyramids, and only that species has been moved extensively beyond its native range.
Beekeepers in Western countries have been reporting slow declines of stocks for many years, apparently due to impaired protein production, changes in agricultural practice, or unpredictable weather. In early 2007, abnormally high die-offs (30-70% of hives) of European honey bee colonies occurred in North America; such a decline seems unprecedented in recent history. (from Wikipedia)
A FEW THINGS I LEARN ABOUT BEES:
20 Amazing Honey Bee Facts!
The honey bee itself, its highly organized society, how it acts with such intricate cooperation, and the various bee products, the more I admire and respect this amazing creature.
2. Honey bees, scientifically also known as Apis mellifera, are environmentally friendly and are vital as pollinators.
3. It is the only insect that produces food eaten by man.
4. Honey is the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, including enzymes, vitamins, minerals, and water; and it's the only food that contains "pinocembrin", an antioxidant associated with improved brain functioning.
5. Honey bees have 6 legs, 2 compound eyes made up of thousands of tiny lenses (one on each side of the head), 3 simple eyes on the top of the head, 2 pairs of wings, a nectar pouch, and a stomach.
6. Honey bees have 170 odorant receptors, compared with only 62 in fruit flies and 79 in mosquitoes. Their exceptional olfactory abilities include kin recognition signals, social communication within the hive, and odor recognition for finding food. Their sense of smell was so precise that it could differentiate hundreds of different floral varieties and tell whether a flower carried pollen or nectar from metres away.
7. The honey bee's wings stroke incredibly fast, about 200 beats per second, thus making their famous, distinctive buzz. A honey bee can fly for up to six miles, and as fast as 15 miles per hour.
8. The average worker bee produces about 1/12th teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.
9. A hive of bees will fly 90,000 miles, the equivalent of three orbits around the earth to collect 1 kg of honey.
10. It takes one ounce of honey to fuel a bee’s flight around the world.
11. A honey bee visits 50 to 100 flowers during a collection trip.
12. The bee's brain is oval in shape and only about the size of a sesame seed, yet it has remarkable capacity to learn and remember things and is able to make complex calculations on distance travelled and foraging efficiency.
13. A colony of bees consists of 20,000-60,000 honeybees and one queen. Worker honey bees are female, live for about 6 weeks and do all the work.
14. The queen bee can live up to 5 years and is the only bee that lays eggs. She is the busiest in the summer months, when the hive needs to be at its maximum strength, and lays up to 2500 eggs per day. Click here to learn more about the Honey Bee Life Cycle,
15. Larger than the worker bees, the male honey bees (also called drones), have no stinger and do no work at all. All they do is mating.
16. Each honey bee colony has a unique odour for members’ identification.
17. Only worker bees sting, and only if they feel threatened and they die once they sting. Queens have a stinger, but they don’t leave the hive to help defend it.
18. It is estimated that 1100 honey bee stings are required to be fatal.
19. Honey bees communicate with one another by "dancing".
20. During winter, honey bees feed on the honey they collected during the warmer months. They form a tight cluster in their hive to keep the queen and themselves warm.
BEE RIGHT BACK...
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