Success Stories

A family on Q Street returned home on a Tuesday afternoon to find a dense cluster of approximately 15,000 honeybees hanging from their front porch railing. The swarm had settled during a natural colony split — a healthy biological behavior that often alarms homeowners unfamiliar with bee behavior.

Our rescue team arrived within 90 minutes of the call. Using a specialized collection box and gentle smoke application, the team coaxed the swarm into the hive body over the course of about two hours. No protective chemicals were used. The queen was located and confirmed inside the box before transport.

The colony was transferred the following morning to a partner apiary in Rancho Cordova, where it was placed in a managed hive and allowed to establish. Within two weeks, the colony was producing comb and showing all signs of a stable, thriving population.

Swarms like this one — intercepted before a panicked call to an exterminator — represent exactly the kind of intervention our program was built for. A healthy colony that took years to build was preserved in under an afternoon.

A Folsom elementary school discovered a colony of roughly 8,200 honeybees had built an established hive inside an exterior wall cavity adjacent to a third-grade classroom. The nest had been there for at least one full season, evidenced by several pounds of comb and brood visible through an access panel.

Extermination was the district's initial recommendation. Our team was contacted by a science teacher who had read about our cutout work and asked whether removal was possible. It was — but it required two days of careful deconstruction.

On day one, our beekeeping team opened the wall panel, removed comb sections by hand, and transferred brood frames into a transport hive. The queen was found and secured on the morning of day two. The remaining bees followed into the hive body through an entrance reducer placed at the original nest opening overnight.

The colony was relocated to a wildlife preserve east of Folsom where it has since been adopted into a research monitoring program. The school now hosts annual bee education assemblies in partnership with our education team — turning an unexpected wall colony into a lasting curriculum touchstone.

A heritage oak in Land Park — estimated at over 80 years old — was scheduled for major limb trimming after a storm. The tree service discovered a large, established colony occupying a cavity in the main trunk. The colony, which we later estimated at roughly 22,000 bees, had been resident for multiple seasons and had built an extensive honeycomb structure inside the cavity.

The tree service contacted us after the homeowner asked whether extermination could be avoided. We coordinated with the crew to delay work by 24 hours to allow our team to assess the situation. What we found was one of the largest established cavity colonies we had encountered that year.

Using a vacuum collection system calibrated for gentle bee capture, our team worked alongside the tree crew over a full morning to extract the colony without harming the oak or the bees. Comb sections were removed and tied into empty frames for transfer. The queen was located in the lower portion of the cavity.

The colony was placed in a managed hive at a restoration apiary and monitored through the winter. It survived the season and is now one of our most productive research colonies, contributing to ongoing data on feral colony adaptation in urban tree environments.