Swarm Cut Out.

Today's principle task was to participate in my first cut out of a wild bee colony.
Leading the extraction was my bee mentor Warren Bee and his neighbour, also experienced extractor, Dave.
Well, the colony was hiding in a wall in an abandoned dairy building. Two things straight up to assault the senses, the smell of rear poo (and dust) and a vast number of dead bees. In a north facing wall below the kitchen sink, these bees head cooked in hot weather.

The process was to remove all the internal fittings and linings, remove comb and suck up as many bees as possible. Good comb was saved for honey extraction, old comb was trashed. Sucking up the bees was done using a little vacuum cleaning drawing bees through a filtered hive box especially designed for the job.
It took about 3.5 hours. I never got stung, so I liked them all. Hopefully, of those that survive this process, they will have a brighter future than their old buddies.

PS. As it happens I went to my mentor's yard the following morning. Our first observation was that they seemed to be working well. Good news!

My mentor, who is quick to caution me not to open up hives too often, wanted to do an inspection. So we did. We found lots of bees on the sticky frames and the two frames of brood we cut from the wild nest. Soon after we spotted the Q, mentor was happy, not just because he could make money with less work, but