On Friday, September 16th Pony Boy Gilbert of Urban Wildlife Solutions in Veneta came out to the Grange to relocate our unintentional tenants, a colony of 100’s of thousands of bees, from the back wall. Joan Baratta, Lance Lindsey and Licia Shultz, who will be caring for the bees were there to oversee the process. Check out the short slide show from Flickr below or the great movie Joan made that details the whole thing on the Grange’s Facebook page.

The $460 raised to relocate the bees will just cover the $350 removal (including new bee box) and fixing the wall once the bees have been moved further away. One of the fascinating pieces of info learned in this undertaking is that bees can be moved either 2 ft or 2 miles away in one day. Anything in between causes mass confusion and bad outcomes. So for now they are very near their old home. Licia may be relocating the bees to her home, or caring for  them in their special bee box on the grange grounds if her place is too shady for them to thrive.

Pony Boy will be processing the honey for the grange and sealing each 1/2 pint with a layer of their own wax. We hope to have the honey available for purchase at the Harvest Festival on October 22. He also had some ideas on installing one way doors to move the bats out of the belfry, which is a longer story for another post. Stay tuned.

[sb name=”bee slideshow”]