Ok, giving this a shot...here's the first (I'm really bad at this stuff so be patient pleeze!).
cook shed cut out part 1.wmv (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sa9H6_Ez_Y#)
*Note: No trash bags full of brood comb were used in the making of this video
Part two to follow
Scott
Enjoyed it! No honey or nectar and yet still nice bees!
...JP
Everyone is so relaxed, both the humans and the bees.
Is it really a ginsu knife?
That is the same knife I have been using for years, they work great.
A serrated edge will saw the combs nicely and that forked end will slide between combs and cut the brace comb.
Ginsu knives are fantastic for a few reasons: they stay sharp, no matter what you put them through and they are flexible, which I find a prerequisite for a good cut out knife.
I like my current knife but miss my Ginsu I left at a cut out about two years ago.
...JP
I see Peggy got more camera time in video1 As you can tell I watched video 2 first I'm always doing things backwards :-D
Great video. Why do you think they had no food store?
And how do we know that all that brood did not go into a trash bag after you got home?
Allen, I looked carefully in every bit of comb and saw 0 nectar...poor things were starving. The other colony had nectar but very little and neither had capped honey.
If you notice towards the end you can see the brood comb go into a hive body...no trash bags! :-D There was a good bit of empty comb there that did get rendered. It looked as if that wall had been occupied by as many as 5 previous colonies. For some reason (my stupidity I expect) the clip where I showed this and all of the hive beetle and wax moth damage was omitted.
Scott
On the nectar, Maybe they were a new swarm just getting started? Or just robbed out? Or lost their foragers a while back?
I think you may be right on this. Given how many times this wall cavity had been occupied in the past it's reasonable to assume this colony had moved in fairly recently. There was 4 frames of brood though and I did see one starting to emerge so it had to be at least 3-4 weeks old. I think everything they were bringing in was being consumed...just not enough resources to store.
Scott
My first 3-4 removals of this season were like that. Bees were barely squeaking by. No stores and hardly any nectar. Good thing y'all were there to bail them out.
...JP