July 31, 2018 – Slinger, WI – It was a typical day at work for Mike Metz from Seven Hills Honey in Port Washington.
The project at hand was the removal of thousands of bees from under the roofline and between the walls at the back of Kettle Moraine Playhouse in Slinger.
This past June a story ran on WashingtonCountyInsider.com regarding honeybees that were between the walls of the former St. Paul’s Church, 204 S. Kettle Moraine Drive.
There was a small, quarter-size hole at the roofline of the brick building about 25-feet up and if you stared at the little black hole you soon figured out what the buzz was all about.
Metz used a vacuum box to gently remove the bees.
There was plenty of activity around the boxes holding the sections of hives in the back of Metz’s pickup. “Those bees are still stragglers and with no queen to lay eggs those bees will die off in a couple days,” he said.
The process to remove the bees took about six hours. Metz said there were around 50,000 bees total. “They’re not real healthy,” he said.
There were also chunks of hive in a box in Metz’s truck; those contained bee eggs. See video below.
Metz will be feeding the bees for the next two months so they can return to better health. He said he did not see the queen bee but knew she was captured by the reactions of the other bees around the box.
Metz was dressed in a full-on protective beekeepers suit and hood. He said he did get stung a couple times during the process but he shrugged it off. It wasn’t the first time.
The Kettle Moraine Playhouse will begin auditions tonight for the thriller ‘Deathtrap.’ A dozen performances will run in October.