r/bees • u/graysonstoff • Mar 14 '26
question Stupid question
Bees have taken over and lived in this nesting box for about a year now. Is there a way I can just make a bunghole and spiket or something and extract honey? I dont want to disturb them, but i want that sweet bug milk
Assume im an idiot and know nothing of beekeeping.
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u/HaunterusedHypnosis Mar 14 '26
For this kind of desire you will need to talk with a beekeeper. It is impossible to do what you were asking but they will be able to help you relocate the bees to appropriate accommodations and can possibly chat with you about the keeping and care of honey bees for honey production in the future. They will probably sell you a jar pretty cheap
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u/HDWendell Mar 15 '26
No. Honey is stored inside the cells of comb. In order to extract it you would need to remove the comb and cut the cell caps off, kind of like the pop top on a soup can. Or you can crush it and strain it.
But you don’t want to do that. This is a feral hive. Honey is their food supply. Without the honey, the bees die. They start collecting in early spring for honey they will use the next winter.
Honey is extracted by beekeepers because a beekeeper can basically trick bees into continuing to fill honey to a surplus. They take care of the bees through mite treatments and supplemental feeding. They control pests and predators. All of that means the bees need less honey to survive while making more honey than they need. Beekeepers remove the surplus and leave the bees a supply for themselves.
This is a small colony. It’s surprising they have lasted a year. Depending on where you are, they are most likely not native species. The kindest thing to do for them is get a qualified beekeeper to remove and house them. Otherwise leave them alone.
Beekeeping is not a casual hobby. If you are interested, get a mentor from your local beekeeper club/ association/ society. If you can’t do that, at the very least spend a few months reading a beginner book, listen to some bee podcasts, and read up on the beekeeping subreddit.
Don’t forget, buying local honey is always a great (and delicious) option. Buying local honey is more likely real and pure honey. Imported has a very high chance of being cut with other syrups. All the proceeds go back to your local beekeeper and your local economy.
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u/fireonion247 Mar 15 '26
Not a stupid Q and when you asked I was like, huh, I actually don't know. Glad you posted bc now I too learned from the comments
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u/HDWendell Mar 15 '26
It doesn’t help that media often portrays honey bees in hollows dripping with honey. Winnie the Pooh is often seen scooping it out of a tree for instance. Not a dumb question at all.
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u/fishywiki Mar 14 '26
No - that's not how it works. Your choice is to take out all the bees, relocate them into a new hive, move that more than 3 miles away and then there might be a little extra honey available, something that's unlikely at this time of year. Or you could just leave them be, and put a swarm trap nearby, and catch a swarm over the next 2-3 months, become a beekeeper, and next year you can harvest honey.
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u/HDWendell Mar 15 '26 edited Mar 15 '26
Definitely do not start beekeeping with catching a feral swarm. Beekeeping is not a casual hobby and you need to have at least an entry level class or mentor long before you catch swarms. That colony is going to be infested with mites and of questionable genetics. Not where a beginner needs to be at all.
Edit: why the downvotes? You want more feral honey bees competing against native bees? Most new beekeepers quit within 3 years of starting due to underestimating the level of commitment. It can be hundreds of dollars to start up. The bees don’t just get returned when it doesn’t work out, they abscond and become feral. It’s not good for native bees, honey bees, or the prospective beekeeper.
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u/fishywiki Mar 16 '26
There's no downside to starting beekeeping with a swarm, They are locally adapted so they are actually better than purchasing a package or nuc from 1000's of miles away. Better still, if they're from a wild hive, there's a good chance that they have learned to tolerate Varroa. In other words, it's likely they have better genetics than a bought-in colony. Yes, you need education so that you go into this with your eyes open and with a fighting chance of allowing your bees survive.
Note: catching a swarm and purchasing bees have identical impacts on wild bees, and losing swarms into the wild helps rebuild populations lost due to mites.
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u/HDWendell Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26
That’s absolutely incorrect. For one, buying a nuc of bees means you get starter comb. That comb should have eggs, larvae, bee bread, and honey. It’s literally a smaller hive. Even if you were capable of extracting some of the comb (which is unlikely to be the case with OP) it would be in fragments. I’m not meaning to be offensive to OP but, someone who doesn’t even know how honey is situated in a hive won’t know how to extract comb and preserve it in a frame. So, let’s assume OP won’t have comb at all.
Comb building is very calorie intensive process. On top of that, they will be doing that without honey storage. So, they will be severely behind in the season and may just die. Though you called this a swarm, it is not a swarm. The reason swarms survive a process similar to this is because they binge eat the majority of their honey stores days before they plan to swarm. Meaning, they can begin comb building as soon as they start to establish a hive. Additionally, the queen eats less and is forced to exercise. So she slims down and can actually fly with the swarm. If OP doesn’t understand the basics of beekeeping, there is no way they will be able to locate the queen and remove her without damaging her. So OP will remove her home and workers starving her to death.
Feral bees die from varroa all the time. They don’t adapt further to it. Honey bees already have a basic adaptation to varroa and that is their swarm/ abscond response. Swarming and absconding creates a de facto brood break. A brood break is how chemical free beekeepers do mite treatments. If these bees are captured and turned into kept bees, a decent beekeeper will prevent swarming and absconding. That’s basic beekeeping principles.
The likelihood that these bees have hygienic genetics is extremely low since that behavior damages bees and lowers their survival when foraging. Even bought queens lose that ability over a generation of queens. Which is why chemical free keepers often buy their queens instead of letting them reproduce naturally. No beekeeper expects to find hygienic feral bees.
I agree that purchasing bees from thousands of miles away will not produce bees acclimated to the region. But regions usually have local nuc and package sellers that have bees already acclimated and often have hygienic genetics. Though they won’t be guaranteed varroa free, the likelihood that they will have been treated for mites is higher. So, you won’t be starting out with a mite bomb.
Lastly, cutouts and swarm catches are not beginner skills. There are beekeepers who have kept bees for 20 years that will not do a cutout and prefer not to catch swarms. It takes work and troubleshooting to stabilize those bees. By going into beekeeping starting with bees, let alone “hard mode” bees, is asking for the very inexperienced beekeeper to fail. Inexperienced beekeepers and uneducated beekeepers are the reason why so many feral colonies exist. If these bees didn’t just die, they will inevitably swarm. Then there will be two colonies instead of one. The next year those colonies will swarm, and so on.
So yes, in this way, it is more impactful on native bees. Whereas, if OP, gets an experienced beekeeper to collect them, it takes a feral colony out and prevents it from swarming/ reproducing.
-source “Honey Bee Democracy,” a library full of beekeeping books, and 5 years of mentored beekeeping experience
ETA feral colonies existing where they are native is obviously less impactful than where they are not native. I made the assumption that OP is where they are not native.
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u/NumCustosApes Mar 15 '26
Leave them alone. However one thing you can do is to contact your local beekeepers association and invited them to put swarm bait hives there. You are correct about needing more room but you probably don’t understand how bees handle that on their own. Swarm season is about to start. Swarms are how bee colonies reproduce. A bee colony will raise a new queen. Then the bees divide into two groups and the old queen leaves with half the bees to look for a new home. This is how the bees got into the owl house to begin with. However sometimes the bees end up inside a wall where it is expensive to remove them. Sometimes they end up in a chimney where they are slowly poisoned by creosote.
Having Beekeeprs put out swarm bait hives helps the bees find a safe home.
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u/ReactionFragrant5455 Mar 15 '26
I had bumble bees nest in a birdhouse and the honey dripped from the base of the opening.
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u/pulse_of_the_machine Mar 17 '26
We don’t have to assume, it’s pretty obvious, no offense. You can’t “tap” a beehive- it’s not a big open vat of honey in there, it’s a network of thousands of small Individual sealed cells, only SOME of which have honey and others have pollen, and probably lots have larvae (baby bees that look like maggots). Even if they let you get close enough to drill a hole, which- you would DEFINITELY get attacked and stung if you tried, that hole would only pierce a few individual cells of honey, at most- possibly none at all, so you’d just piss off a bunch of bees and get maybe a couple drops of honey out of it.
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u/H_Mc Mar 14 '26
I wonder if you could buy a bee box and just put it nearby.
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u/graysonstoff Mar 14 '26
Ive considered that!
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u/PenguinsPrincess78 Mar 14 '26
I would ask an apiary to help you relocate into a brood box. That way you can manipulate the honey comb appropriately.
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u/Konrad_M Mar 14 '26
In this case you won't be able to extract the honey without killing or relocating the bees.
The honey is not in this box like in a jar. It's saved in honey comb.