The following story/pictures ran in the Denton paper last month Prosper is just up the road.
John and Penne Coxsey of Pilot Point remove a hive of bees from
an oak tree in Denton on Friday. Resident Diana Mitchell found the
bees in her backyard on Farris Street when the tree fell over.
Penne Coxsey brushes bees into a box while her husband, John, looks
for the queen bee in a fallen tree in a Denton backyard.
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“They’re the most fascinating insect God ever put on Earth,” Coxsey said.
Over the years, Coxsey kept bees and sold the honey, learning by trial and error and by befriending other beekeepers. He knows how many eggs the queen lays in a day (2,500 to 3,000), how long until the larvae hatch (about two weeks) and how long they stay inside before they get to work (another two weeks).
“Then they work so hard they fly their wings off in 30 days,” Coxsey said.
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Once they were ready, the couple gave their phone number to local exterminators. With domestic bees suffering a mysterious decline, wild beehives are better moved than killed.Recently, Diana Mitchell was happy to learn from her exterminator that the bees living in a fallen oak tree in her Denton backyard might find a better home. She felt bad that she had mistaken the hive for wasps and had sprayed it.
As a second-grade teacher, she’s always trying to coach her students to observe, but not disturb, nature.
“I knew better,” Mitchell said.
She called the Coxseys, who started the slow, careful process of rescuing the hive on Friday.
John Coxsey used a chain saw and wedges to break the tree and reach the honeycomb, placing some of the combs into a waiting apiary. Penne Coxsey helped prop up sections of tree trunk and brushed hundreds of worker bees inside the box. They worked for a few hours before realizing the queen was probably deep inside the knot of the old tree.
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But Penne Coxsey said it would be best to leave the apiary in place for a few days anyways, so that more of the scout bees could be recovered.
Meanwhile, John Coxsey put some of the honeycomb in plastic bags to freeze. The combs had wax moth larvae in them. Freezing would kill the parasites and help reclaim the combs for the bees. There were enough wax- and bee-eating worms throughout the hive that he was convinced the hive would have died off.
If he can’t recover the queen, he plans to buy a new one from a supplier in Kentucky, Coxsey said. The key was to recover enough worker bees to rescue and rebuild the hive.
He admired their pluck — the bees kept building, even after the tree fell and the moths invaded. And they stayed calm through all his sawing and thumping and brushing and dumping.
“They’re good bees,” Coxsey said.