Pulled a hive from under a gazebo deck today

I would do this kind of cut-out every day and twice on Sunday. The bees had just moved in this spring as you can see from the beautiful new comb. The swarm must have been small because there weren't that many bees, perhaps 15,000 or so. They had moved in under a gazebo deck in the homeowners back yard.

I pulled a deck panel to get a look and locate the hive. I was very pleased with what I found. The hive was small the bees were very uninterested in me.

We pulled 3 deck panels and raised them up to sit on a couple of saw-horses. The bees were very gentle and as you can see in the picture they got out of the way so we could remove the comb. I've never seen this behavior before.

One piece of brood comb was still under the panel that couldn't be raised, but it was easy to remove and rubber band into the frame without damage. There were several combs full of brood and a couple with nectar with a tiny bit of capped honey.

Once the comb was removed and banded the remaining bees were clustered under the raised deck so we just shook them down into the hive after placing it below them. Then we closed the hive an replaced the decking. We placed the hive near the place where the were entering their hive below the deck so they could find their way to their new home.

We gave them a little while to settle in then opened the hive and found the queen. She is caged in the hive now so she won't try to move back under the deck. (She is the one in the bottom right of the picture.) We will give them a couple of days to clean up any remaining nectar/honey then move them to the Grand Prairie apiary. We will release the queen once they are at the apiary.