I have been working with a fellow who does wall extractions. I am at his call and I bucket up and down his supplies, wash his rags and generally do gofer work. I’ve promised him queen bees for life and he gives me the feral genetics! I have 2 hives that had been in the same walls for 16 years. One was right over the old fellow’s window and he loved these bees, but new neighbors, new house changed all that. Another extraction we did, the tenants of the 4 plex talk of ours being the fourth time they have gotten comb honey from the bees in 10 years. I have some bees from a stump that had been there for 16 years.

It was in front of a children’s school at the College of Marin, where people talk of the swarms they have seen issue. And last week we took out a colony that had been in a roof in a mansion for 40 years. All the “kids” talk about “the bees.” In my own yard, I have bees who have lived in a tree for 9 years. They were in the whole tree for at least 6 years and I have had the chunk of tree for 3 years. Bees that survive without intervention by man…………ahhhhh. They have a natural resistance to the mites that are killing the honeybee.

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