Bee Movals - Pty LTD

29/08/2025

How old is that bee? 28,5,25

Did you know you can often tell a honey bee's age just by looking at it? It's not an exact science, but our fuzzy little friends show clear physical signs as they journey through their short but incredibly busy lives! 🐝 For a newly emerged honey bee, you'll notice it looks incredibly fresh and fuzzy, with a full coat of tiny, delicate hairs all over its body.

Their wings are pristine and clear ✨. For the first couple of weeks, these youngsters stay inside the hive, acting as "house bees" 🏠, busy with chores like cleaning cells and feeding the next generation of larvae 👶& tending to her Majesty.

As a honey bee reaches its middle age, typically around 10-20 days old, it starts to look a bit sleeker. Their constant work inside the hive begins to rub off some of that baby fuzz, making their bodies appear shinier ✨. During this time, they take on more physically demanding jobs like building new honeycomb, producing wax, and standing guard at the hive entrance 🛡️. Their wings remain in good condition as they’ve not yet been exposed to the rigours of flying outdoors. These bees are at the peak of their indoor career, helping the queen run the bustling household! 👑

Finally, we have the senior bees, or foragers, who are over 20 days old. These are the bees you see most often buzzing around your garden 🌸. They are much less fuzzy, with a noticeably smoother, more polished thorax from all the wear and tear of their hard work. Most tellingly, their wings may look frayed, tattered, or even torn 😢 from thousands of foraging flights. These brave bees are the ones that have been out in the world, collecting pollen and nectar 🍯 to sustain the colony. For them, a full life is a short one, often lasting just three to six weeks in the busy summer months.

National Charity for 30,000 amateur beekeepers

24/06/2025

Just read this article and it made me think:

*Free Bee Removals Kills More Bees Than It Saves!*

This might seem like a counter intuitive title, but trust me on this...after you read the next few paragraphs... you'll start to understand.

There's a very small percentage of people out there that remove bees, and an even smaller percentage of those that do...that know what they are doing! When I say "know what they're doing" I don't just mean in how to remove the bees safely, but also how to keep bees alive in general!

Most of the people that will "do it free" are willing to do so because they NEED bees, and most of those need them because they keep losing them! A good beekeeper needs bees, in the same way a good tree service needs firewood! It's pretty much only the failing beekeepers that NEED bees--with maybe the exception of a small few that are working on breeding programs where the genetics have a lot to offer an already thriving bee yard, but those beekeepers generally won't work for free.

Now you might say--well, if they don't do it for free, the bees will just die, or the owners will just kill them. Chances are the bees are going to just die from the free removal, or a botched removal, or bad beekeeping practices afterward, but the real problem lies in people getting the impression bee removals are FREE, and that makes them think any price over free is expensive--which is more likely to lead them to just killing the bees, because they think the person that charges is too expensive or somehow ripping them off. Without the "free" perception, many would just call around, find that everyone charges about the same price--like with exterminators--and go with who seems the best choice; instead, they call a few people, and then say "but so and so will do it free" (but so and so didn't mention free if it's not on a ladder, or too hard to get to, or if they have to crawl under a floor, or they can't do it this week because they have to work...and so on), and they don't understand that so and so might burn down their house with a poorly loaded smoker, because they don't really know what they are doing, and might leave the job with the hive wide open because they really couldn't do the removal, as it was more than they expected and were capable of doing--but they didn't have the experience to know that when they said...Free!

If you ask the client how much would you charge to tear apart a bee hive with 50,000 bees in it, they'll tell you they wouldn't do it at any price, but once they get the impression there are those that do it because they want the bees, or because" the bees are in trouble"--they have a hard time understanding that it's actually a job that requires a lot of equipment, even more skill, and that there's also a lot of work afterwards to manage the bees to get them back on the right trajectory that will get them through winter!

Where it might seem that working for free is a good idea to those with no experience, I'd suggest just working for less than those with experience. Be honest about your skill level, but if one day you get good at it and realize that it's a lot of work when you have to do many in a summer, and have to have enough bee yards to put them in... you're going to regret all the "free" jobs you did, and the problems you caused for your future self!

21/06/2025

07/06/2025

A autumn apiary

07/06/2025

A little winter swarm

07/06/2025

Handle with care.
Wild hives produce the best art

07/06/2025

A fantastic idea for next Bosses day, a anonymous gift. Please read the small print

07/06/2025

A bit of a wasp problem

07/06/2025

The bees always provide the best of what you see vs what you get.

07/06/2025

Not just any honey by product, Mead fit for Vikings