Any beekeepers here?

A good, healthy queen can lay 1500 to 2000 eggs per day. The queens that swarm are usually older and toward the lower end of the scale. 21 days from egg to hatched bee. Average life span is about 42 days. Swarm is about 3 lbs of bees which is about 3-4000 bees per pound. Glad you're trying to relocate them. Too many people would have sprayed them.
 
Over here in Scotland where I live, Unfortunately most of the younger neighbours somewhat sanitise their gardens, which gets rid of bee's and wasps, By sanitising I mean monoblock pavings and ripping out flower beds etc, so unfortunately we do not have much feeding for these wee guys, Over the past years I had a small colony in the brick work at my back door , It was always nice to sit with a cup of coffee and watch these wild bees come and go, Unfortunately a couple of years back we had a prolonged rainy spell , followed by a long cold snap, and that wiped the colony out, When the spring came back round the hive never recovered
One vof my pals is a bee enthusiast and in his works yard he has about six hives , A year back some little vandals broke in and torched one of his works buildings, and with all the smoke and mess he thought that would be the end of his bee's, But No ! the following morning where the hives were concerned it was back to buisiness.

Long years back, when I lived in a fairly remote area, which was surrounded by trees, and deeper undergrowth at the bottom of my garden I had a large wasp colony, these guys can be big trouble, but strange to say the problem was minimal, and where the garden was concerned these wee guys, did not half snack out on greenfly and other pests, The down side was at the end of summer when they were tired and bad tempered , and if they came near the house a sting is not nice, to some folk's it can be fatal.
 
Meat bees / yellow jackets and black widows are about the only critters on my shoot first ask questions later list. I'll even let the black widows alone if they are somewhere that won't be a problem for me.

I have my wife and kids trained to get me if they find something that doesn't belong in the house. I've probably escorted a couple hundred spiders out of the house, and at least one scorpion. I have arranged to have rattlesnakes relocated.

Most of these critters have a job to do, they just don't need to be doing it in my house.


I do have to admit the thought has crossed my mind to leave them alone and put a plexiglass window in that inner wall so I can watch them to their thing.
 
Bees will cover a glass observation window with propolis (bee glue) in no time to shut out the light. They like it dark in the hive. All the dances they do and the work they do is all in the dark. It's amazing how they work and live in total darkness. The more I learn about bees I realize there's so much we'll never know about how the operate.

I can't stand the people that will go out of their way to run a snake over, even dead ones. I've seen people swerve into the other lane to hit a harmless snake or turtle. Snakes I find in the yard usually get relocated only because I don't want to hit them with the lawnmower.
 
One of the swarms I caught about 5 lbs of bees trying to fit in a 3 lb box. That's a 5 frame deep box. All the frames are covered inside also.
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Bees will cover a glass observation window with propolis (bee glue) in no time to shut out the light. They like it dark in the hive. All the dances they do and the work they do is all in the dark. It's amazing how they work and live in total darkness. The more I learn about bees I realize there's so much we'll never know about how the operate.

I can't stand the people that will go out of their way to run a snake over, even dead ones. I've seen people swerve into the other lane to hit a harmless snake or turtle. Snakes I find in the yard usually get relocated only because I don't want to hit them with the lawnmower.

When I was a kid there was a small kids science center at a local park. One of the exhibits was a working beehive, basically a bee box with one side removed placed against the building. They had a window set into the wall looking into the hive so the kids could see them at work from inside the building. They even had the queen marked with a colored dot to identify her. I remember being fascinated watching them when I was 4 or 5 years old. I have no idea what they did to keep the light from being an issue.

I know it would not be a practical thing to do, just something that popped into my head. I'd probably spend hours watching them instead of making stuff.
 
Google "observation hive" and some look like fine furniture. I remember the Smithsonian Institute had an observation hive in one of the buildings. i could also spend hours watching them work.
 
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