BBE-Tech: Honey Bee Conservation

Feel free to drop us a line to let us know what you would like to see available in stock in this area.

Our top priority is to make the beekeeping experience in the Midwest a personal experience.  We want to be able to offer you what you’re looking for, when you need it.

Local Beekeeper Support

We are always open to buying honey, wax and other products made from those by local beekeepers.

Sometimes, local hobby beekeepers discover that bees are making much more than they expected and become overwhelmed with how much honey and wax they have left over.

BBE-Tech will buy locally produced honey and wax providing a source of income and an outlet for the extras local beekeepers end up with.

If you are a local beekeeper and would like to know more about selling honey and wax to us, please email bigbear@bbe-tech.com or call at (402) 740-1454

Honey Bee Removal

If you have a swarm  that has landed on your property, we will be glad to come and remove it, usually at little to no cost at all.  A swarm is the natural process of honey bees to reproduce the colony.  They gorge on honey before they leave the old nest and land somewhere close by to allow scout bees to look for a new home.  A swarm that is less than two days old is almost always little to no threat at all since the honey they gorged on pacifies them.  swarms in a location longer than two days are getting hungry and may be a bit less friendly.

If you have a colony of honey bees living within a wall or inside a cavity in a building, we can come and remove the bees and the comb (for relocation, if they are still alive) and properly clean out the space to minimize the possibility of bees seeking that spot as a home again, based on the scent of a previous hive.

The comb and everything must be removed carefully as just leaving wax comb and likely honey in a cavity could end up in damage to the house or building when the wax melts without live bees to regulate temperature.

We are not carpenters, you must arrange for a handyman or contractor to handle the related carpentry, drywall, etc… work of exposing and closing up the area.

For a full removal and clean-out of a honey bee hive, we charge $150.00. for LIVE  bee removal (not bad considering most exterminators in the area charge about $150.00 and still leave the wax and honey in the wall to create problems later)and $25/hr after 4 hours. Many removals can be done in less than 4 hours.  If the bees have been poisoned or killed, The rate is $150.00 ( it does us no good at all if the bees are dead or poisoned and if they are dead, it is just a clean up and damage prevention for the property owner.)

‘Signature’ Business Beekeeping

Many businesses are looking for ways to have a positive impact on the environment and show that they are involved as a member of the community.  We offer special ‘Signature’ bee hives that are impressively painted and that stand out both artistically and as terrific attention-getters.

You can arrange to have a ‘Signature’ hive or more than one, located on your businesses property and carefully managed to ensure the honey bees will survive successfully while pollinating flowers and improving the public areas around you at the same time.

Honey Bee ‘retirement’

Do you have one or more hives and you are wanting to get out of beekeeping?  For whatever reasons, it happens.  Please don’t kill your bees or just abandon them, we will negotiate a fair price and take those bees over so they can stay alive and healthy.

Adopt A Hive Today

Honey bees are ideal pollinators because out of all the pollinators around, only they specifically target each type of flower and only that type of flower in an area before moving to another type of flower. That means if you have a vegetable garden that has blooms and the honey bees find it, they will only work those particular blooms before going to another type of flower.  Meaning, your vegetables will get the best pollination possible causing them to grow bigger and have more vegetables to succeed.

What’s better, with Adopt-A-Hive pollination services, you don’t have to become a beekeeper to have it happen.  Let us handle it for you in on of two different ways.

1) Short term placement – We bring one or more hives to your location in the Spring, properly set them up and inspect them every month, after the 3 months is up, we come and get the hives, you never have to handle them at all. You keep half the honey they make while they are on your property. There is a moderate cost to handle handle transportation and management of the bees, but it is probably lower than you think. Call us at (402) 740-1454 to find out.

2) Long term placement – We bring one or more hives to your location for permanent placement.  That’s right, you let us stay all year long and we do all the work.  The best part is, you get to keep half of the honey they make on your property.  We come out to inspect the bees every month and take care of them.  Call us at (402) 740-1454 and find out how little it can cost to help us build healthy honey bees and contribute to honey bee conservation while getting your flowers , trees and vegetables pollinated by the best pollinators around.

Benefits of Adopt-A-Hive are:

1) We are able to keep more honey bees alive and active by having more places to place them.

2) You get the best pollination available by honey bees who have made pollination their signature contribution to our ecology and economy.

3) You get access to the best, healthiest honey ever made.  Local honey, using pollen and nectar from your local neighborhoods.

4) As a host of one or more Adopt-A-Hives, you will have access to the full reports and photos of the inspections of the hives on your property.

5) You will be listed on this website as one of our official partners with an official apiary name given to your property.

6) You have every opportunity to learn to be a beekeeper.  We will help you to learn and take over the hives we provide if you are interested.

Conservationist Education

Honey bee conservation is more than keeping bees.  It’s providing education and information to residents, local schools, agencies and government bodies about:

• the beneficial impact honey bees have on the health of the local ecology such as flowering trees, flower gardens, vegetable gardens, not to mention the ornamental trees and flowers planted to make neighborhoods more appealing and healthy places to live.
• the positive impact of honey bee derived products on medicine, food, health and other products.
• the impact of honey bee pollination on over 100 crops and plants that directly and indirectly benefits several types of farming and ranching.
• It’s  ‘rescuing’ honey bees from life threatening situations where the bees have naturally swarmed or built a hive in someone’s property and the people don’t  want them there.  The bees just did what they do naturally  and in most cases, would be fine.

In many other cases though, the people try to kill them.  They use poisons, smoke, pour gasoline on them, call exterminators and so on.

Honey Bee Conservationist

With honey bees in such a perilous situation already with CCD, diseases and parasites like mites, we don’t need more bees being killed for being in an unwanted place.

As Spring comes along and bees start to swarm, find new homes and begin the busy process of keeping the colony alive, it isn’t too much to ask that we can re-locate them from an unwanted location to our conservation bee yard to build their home without undue problems.

When honey bees swarm and take up hives in people’s homes and buildings later in the year, like Fall, It is much more difficult to relocate them without severely inhibiting their ability to survive the winter.  Fall swarms are already at a disadvantage for trying to build up stores to survive winter as it is, to relocate them after starting to build a new home only pushes their ability to do so even further, decreasing dramatically their odds at surviving.

This is when open minded home and building owners can work with us and allow the bees, who will be formed into a cluster all winter and bothering no one, to stay till the following spring, when relocation efforts can be much more successful at allowing them a chance to survive.

We work with the colony as soon as we know they are from a Fall swarm to provide them food sources that will help them to build up their stored and increase, hopefully, the likelihood of them surviving winter.  Once Winter has begun in earnest, we try to visit occasionally, listening and observing for indications the colony is surviving.  If all goes well, the colony survives until march when we can start providing food resources again that will help them to survive till temperatures rise enough to relocate them successfully.

Once at the conservation yard, we place the colony into hives that allow us to be what we feel is less intrusive to the colony and inhibits their ability to build the colony population and food resources as much as possible.

Legal Beekeeping Advocacy

We are enthusiastic supporters of legal urban beekeeping.

It is often disappointing to note that many communities will introduce ordinances or laws prohibiting or restricting beekeeping with city limits.

Unfortunately, most of these laws begin as a response to fear.  It is never wise to make law based primarily on emotion and the excuses drawn out to support those emotions.

Our conservation beekeeping group wants to work with city, county and state officials to ensure that the community is properly educated about honey bees and the factors involved in having honey bees kept within city limits.  All too often, discussions become debates and conversations become contentious due to power struggles, perceived abuses of authority and over zealous and impassioned advocacy.

We would like to contribute and create an environment of collaboration and cooperation between city, county  and state employees who are just doing their jobs as ascribed to them by the elected officials and the community of beekeepers and future beekeepers who want to be responsible and contribute to the well-being of both bees and community at large.

Favorite Beekeeping Related  Quotes:

Honey Bees biggest problem?  People…

Jerry Hayes, head of apiary inspection at the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, worries that a more severe economic impact on beekeepers may come from overzealous zoning of domestic beekeepers due to misguided worries that having domestic bees may attract the Africanized bees.

“Honey is a byproduct of pollination, which is the most important aspect of managed honey bees, he said. “If beekeepers are zoned, ordinanced and restricted out of areas because of fear — then it is people putting the strain on the keepers and their ability to produce, not the Africanized bees.”