The Buzz Newsletter

Page 9

Make Your Own Bee Vac

Leon Rowell of Montezuma, Iowa is a pretty handy fellow. One of the many things he has built is a Bee Vac. Here is how it all came about.

The Bee Vac is a really slick way to remove honeybees from unwanted locations.

A friend of mine called one day and said that his garage was full of Honey Bees and wondered if I knew how to get rid of them. I told him that I thought I could remove them for him and that I would be up in a couple of days.

I gathered the parts & pieces together and started assembling the Bee Vac. I used an old suitcase that my Mother in law had for the outer case instead of building one out of wood. And I had a vacuum motor from a shop vac that the canister had rusted out on. I used the hose from a larger shop vac that I had thinking it would be easier on the bees as they pass through it.

The vacuum draws air through the hose opening in the inner box and out the screen mesh sides leaving the bees nicely contained for transport.

The next day I made the trip to my friends house to see what the situation was and he wasn’t lying. He definitely had a garage full of bees. The only problem was that most of them were lying on top of his cars and on the floor dead. He had covered the hole on the outside of the building with a piece of metal and they had chewed through the sheetrock on the inside but couldn’t get out of the garage. I put my gear on and removed the piece of sheetrock where the hole they had made was. Unfortunately there were only about 200-300 bees left in the hive area and no sign of a queen. I decided to go ahead and try the Bee Vac anyway so I proceeded to vacuum the bees from the comb. The vacuum worked very well and all of the bees were sucked into the inner box and with no casualties to the bees.

The bottom of the inner box slides away making it easy to deposit the newly acquired bees into a hive body.

I then removed the natural comb from the hive (there was no brood or honey in the comb but I wanted to go through the entire procedure anyway) and wired it into the empty frames and put them into the super. When you get home all you need to do is to set your hive up with the frames of natural comb, set the box with the bees in it on top of the hive and gently slide the bottom from the box. Theoretically the bees will migrate down into the hive. I can’t confirm this because of the condition of this natural hive.

Leon obtained the plans for the Bee Vac from the internet at www.beesource.com/plans/index.htm.

There are plans for several other projects too for anyone needing a project. Thanks Leon.