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Got into bees in a big way this spring. Thought I'd get 4 hives and hope one or two lived. Joined a big bee association and shit kept getting handed to me. I have over 20 bee hives now. Plan on doubling next summer or more. I do bee removals for big bucks and capture swarms.

duckinatorizer wrote:Got into bees in a big way this spring. Thought I'd get 4 hives and hope one or two lived. Joined a big bee association and shit kept getting handed to me. I have over 20 bee hives now. Plan on doubling next summer or more. I do bee removals for big bucks and capture swarms.

That's awesome, I really have always wanted to get into bees but I have never had my own property for it. Share some pictures?

Tapatalk is fighting me on the pics. Got a ton of em too.
Did a cutout job on a super nice hunting lodge owned by an ex-Illini ex-Falcon football player.
The stuff inside that lodge...OMG. Had about $100k just in taxidermy. HUGE red-tail deer head etc.


You don't need to own land to have bees. People will ask you to keep them at their place.
The standard rate to "lease" spots for honeybees is one pint or quart of honey per year per hive. (serious)

I have two way out in an alfalfa field. (good honey right there)
One is on rooftop of The Courier Cafe in Urbana, Illinois.
One is on the rooftop of an Italian restaurant called Bacaro in Champaign.
14 at my parents abandoned house that I keep track of.
8 in my back yard. 26 total.

That's a bunch of bees. Keepers here are hooked on California bees, so it costs a couple hundred bucks or so to get one to come remove wild hives, which seem to pop up most everywhere.

Rick wrote:That's a bunch of bees. Keepers here are hooked on California bees, so it costs a couple hundred bucks or so to get one to come remove wild hives, which seem to pop up most everywhere.

The last bee removal I did...charged $1400. It ain't chump change.

Know our guys aren't getting anywhere near that, country folks would burn 'em out themselves first. Know removing these:


from a neighboring camp's sun porch was $250 and figure they got the rich guy bump.

Removal of a big hive at a project site of mine out in St. James parish (country) went for $350 or so, had to cut them out of the wall, honey all over the place. Neat for me to watch from a distance

The $1400 job was in that hunting lodge. We had to take the facia off and take apart a wall made of BIG rocks. We vacuumed up the bees, took what little honey they had, then patched up the wall. It took 2 or 3 sections of scaffold to get up high enough. The pics from there....nice. I'll try posting them again.

The job b4 that was $1800. Was in a very tall column in a 100-year-old frat house. Three-man job. I got $550, the bees, but gave the honey to the guys I was working with because they asked for it.

Here are pictures of two bee colonies I cut out of a home in Fisher, Illinois last July.

They were large colonies and had about 10-12 pounds of bees each.

How did they not hear the walls buzzing?

We smoke them and they start buzzing loud enough to hear them thru a wall with stethoscope or we also use thermal imaging to find where the colony is. The tall one was tricky because the entrance was way under the soffit. Brick house had some holes drilled in it for old electrical and they were using them but traveling in cracks in the sheathing.
The short one was easy to find because you could tell right where the bees were going in and out.
Have made most of the cash I get from doing the removals. (plus I get the bees and the honey)

Found a recipe for caramel that is made with honey.
2 cups honey
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 cup heavy cream.
pinch of salt

Simply heat it all up to 265 F and pour it into a buttered baking sheet with a rim.
The hard part is not eating it all myself.