Honeybees Extracted From Lawn Room Attic

May 18, 2024

August 7, 2023• By Matt Kelly, [email protected] Matt Kelly, [email protected]

Beekeeper Karen Hall examines a section of the bees’ hive removed from the attic. (Photo by Dan Addison, University Communications)

The University of Virginia’s Academical Village buzzed with excitement last week as some Lawn residents were evicted.

Facilities Management workers and local beekeepers Ken and Karen Hall on Thursday extracted an active honeybee hive that had been in the attic of 33 West Lawn, a student room, for more than a year.

The hive was discovered after Facilities Management workers saw bees moving in and out of a gap in the cornice at the rear exterior of the room. At one point, the hive could have housed up to 50,000 western honeybees, known as Apis mellifera, according to Ken Hall.

According to Ryan Taylor, assistant director for maintenance operations at Facilities Management, the workers were not sure if the hive was entangled with sections of the original Jeffersonian serrated roof now enclosed under the current roof. Their first approach was through the exterior cornice in the exterior rear of the room.

“It was hard to reach or see, even after removing a portion of the exterior wood trim,” Taylor said. “During our initial site investigation, an employee was stung so we aborted our efforts for a little bit.”

Maintenance workers drilled holes in the ceiling and threaded a camera through to get a better view of the hive, but it was still difficult to assess its size.

On Thursday morning, plasterers Matt Proffitt and Robbie Kolb suited up in white cotton bee suits and removed a three-foot square piece of the plaster from the ceiling’s southwest corner to give beekeeper Ken Hall access. Once the ceiling was removed, the combs were visible.

The Halls worked with Randy Spencer, the Central Grounds zone manager; Mark Kutney, an architectural conservator at UVA Facilities Management; and several others to remove sections of the hive while preserving the historic fabric of the Academical Village.

Once the entrance was cut through the ceiling, Hall used a special vacuum cleaner to suck up the bees. While the initial hive was estimated to be large, Taylor said disturbances from the probes may have prompted some bees to leave.

“At some point in time, the colony must have been very large, on the order of 50,000 bees,” Ken Hall said. “The presence of wax moth and hive beetle larva, along with declining bee numbers, indicated that the hive had been in decline for some time.”

Karen Hall said there have been cases of bees absconding, or spontaneously leaving hives for reasons that beekeepers have yet to determine.

“Late swarms sometimes abscond if conditions aren’t right,” Ken Hall said. “When a hive absconds, the entire colony, including the queen, flies from the nest, abandoning the brood. Foragers in the field return to find the colony gone, and have no idea where it went, so they just stay in the nest.”

Ken Hall said as the older brood continues to hatch, they also stay, but that the colony cannot survive for long.

“Scientists don’t know why many absconds occur, there doesn’t seem to be a ‘textbook’ answer,” Ken Hall said. “The bees will look for another cavity of the proper volume to inhabit, typically between 100 yards to a mile away.”

Ken Hall said in seeking an area to establish a hive, bees require a cavity that provides a volume of approximately 40 liters in which to build their comb.

“They particularly prefer sites that another colony has previously inhabited,” Ken Hall said. “Once established, a colony will forage two to three miles from their nest, covering roughly 8,600 acres.”

After vacuuming many of the remaining bees, Ken Hall removed hive sections with a knife, carefully separating them from each other and the surrounding structure. While Ken Hall removed the sections, Karen Hall evaluated them and placed some of them in a standard hive box, fitting them into wooden frames and lashing them in place with a slender nylon twine. She said once the several thousand bees that had been vacuumed up were added to the hive box, they would expand the comb to fit the wooden frame. The Halls carried the hive box to their bee yard in Earlysville.

“We’ll let them settle down for a couple days before checking them to see if we got the queen or not,” Ken Hall said. “If we didn’t get the queen, we’ll combine them with another colony that does have a queen, so the bees we removed will be saved either way. The excess honey will be used to feed this colony, and probably one or two others, to get them ready for winter.”

Several of the hive sections were infested with wax moth larvae, which was destroying the hive. They were trimmed off before the remaining healthy sections were placed in the hive box. Some sections of the hive that were badly infested with wax moth larvae were simply tossed into a trash bag for disposal. Ken Hall said had the combs been left alone, because of the wax moth damage, they would have eventually leaked honey down through the plaster ceiling.

The Halls have gotten familiar with bees on Grounds.

“I’ve been involved with removing bees from the soffits of two of the old dorms and bees from the old hospital at least three times,” Ken Hall said. “Old buildings tend to have lots of cavities without insulation that are attractive to honeybees.”

Taylor said the Halls removed about five gallons of honey from the attic, but left one section of the hive that was connected to an original Jeffersonian roof section. Taylor said there was no honey in the comb section that was left, indicating that the bees were not using it.

Taylor said Thursday that the maintenance crew would leave the cornice open over the weekend to allow the remaining bees to leave the attic. After that, the cornice would be closed again and sealed to prevent other bees from entering.

Matt Kelly

University News Associate Office of University Communications

[email protected] (434) 924-7291

August 28, 2023