Welcome to Saving the Bees in Tucson Arizona!
Here at Abello Bees we pride ourselves on how much we care for our bees and the environment. If you haven’t already heard about us, we utilize the best practices taught in the Organic Sustainable beekeeping industry. In short we let bees live the way they like to live, just in a controlled box environment. Read about different types of hives here. As bees are observed in the environment, they essentially prefer to move into enclosed environments, such as: houses, trees, water boxes in the ground, walls, and any other open space. The bees will move in and start building their hive to grow babies, make and store honey, store other foods such as bee pollen, and also make new queens.
Inside the hive
The simplest way to think of a bee home is to imagine peering into their enclosed space. They typically like a home like humans with a floor, walls, and a roof with an entrance point. The entrance is guarded heavily by the bees who do not want intruders coming into the hive. The honey bees in Tucson are not all Africanized like most people like to hype them up to be, and even if the bees in your home were Africanized there is no way to tell other than sending them to the University of Arizona or another lab to be genetically tested. Even then, does it really matter? In other words guard bees protect the hive, whether they are nice docile bees or mean and nasty bees doesn’t matter they all have stingers to defend the hive if necessary. Further more the hive consists of Brood comb (where the eggs are laid and baby bees are born), honey comb (which melts like water in the Arizona heat), and then the comb used to store pollen, bee bread and other nutritious food for the bees.
Bee A/C – Bees like to have their hive right about 92 degrees year round. Since AZ weather fluctuates so drastically in Tuscon this is a difficult task to accomplish in 120 degree weather, but these amazing little creatures do it, and they usually like to use your pool water. This is why so many home owners end up with a lot of bees near their pool in the summer. They gather the water and head back to the hive where the bees work as a team to cool the hive, fanning their little wings and spraying water into the air in the process essentially creating their own air conditioning, or more accurately evaporate cooler! We’ve felt this phenomena first hand and it is quite refreshing in the hot summer sun.
What to do next
How do I get these bees removed?
Well call us 520-334-1842 Do not call an exterminator. There are a lot of myths floating around out there; “oh there are too many bees in Arizona, they are all Africanized so they need to die, Africanized bees create less honey, it is too hard to remove them so they need to be exterminated, they will just die if you try to remove them, it’s too hot to relocate them successfully”. All those are myths that I like to debunk in my videos, Phoenix Bee removal on Youtube
Recent Swarm saved
This picture is of a recent swarm saved just south of Mount Lemon. The bee swarm had fallen from a weak tree limb, but were all able to crawl inside the bucket to be relocated 🙂
Nice Swarm on the ground