Beekeeping is in no doubt a very pleasing experience.  Whether you run one hive or many you are helping SAVE THE WORLD!  I have heard it said that bees are like the miner's canary, in the sense that they die off when our environment is polluted.  There is pollution coming from so many directions, from the GMO food, to the pesticides, to the GMO seeds and crops, to the sugar water that most beekeepers feed their bees, to chem trails, to antibiotics.  The fight to save these little creatures can seem overwhelming, but like all battles, you can help save them by having your own hive.  This has a multitude of positive results: your home garden will yield more, your flowers will love them, you can have your own honey, and you will literally impact the neighborhood around you.  Now if you are not into keeping your own hives, then call me to remove your swarms or hives and I will gladly relocate them for a fee, or even relocate them to your own hive boxes for a fee, which is what I did in this video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGFLtPuxzfs.  Also learn to do it yourself by signing up here at www.getfreehoney.com Also make sure to sign up to get weekly bee videos from me at www.youtube.com/user/derekabello and click the subscribe button...Who knows it may be your year to be a new beekeeper :)

In the case of bee removal and relocation vs. extermination you get what you pay for...I have had a lot of calls recently stating that a lot of bee keepers will remove bees for free.  Although some bee removals are very straight forward and pretty quick, so are some visits to the doctor and the dentist. Just because something can be quick and easy doesn't mean it is going to be cheap.  A beekeeper has had years of dealing with bees that are just amazing creatures that need a new home, but still need an expert to handle them and properly relocate them if they are going to survive.  Now most bee calls that I have been on are very sticky and hard, this is because of the need to remove the honey comb and relocated it delicately into the new hive.  This is very hard in the hot AZ summer when the wax melts very quickly outside of the bee cooled hive.  Bees keep the temperature of the hive at a very constant temperature as to not allow fluctuating outside temperatures harm the brood (or baby bees) inside.  The removal of hives when done right requires all the removal, cutting and in most cases washing, painting and sealing up the area of removal. After this job, which can take up to 8 hours depending on the size of the average hive, there is still another 2-4 hours of properly placing the bees in a suitable home.  All of this work is great to make and harvest honey from the bees, if they decide they like their new home. If they don't they will move out leaving the beekeeper having lost all of that time to simply allow the bees a new place to leave. This is why we charge.  It is a small fee compared to the extremely valuable service that is provided for the client and the environment.  An exterminator on the other hand, will simply kill the bees (not so great for them or the environment) and more often than not, leave behind a stinking mess of old comb and honey and dead brood for the maggots to clean up.  In that case, the exterminator will need to have the hive removed, or possibly have to be called back later in order to remove the hive, which by then I have heard quotes of up to $900!  This is not to say that an exterminator is not necessary.  There are some cases where Abello Bees doesn't currently have the resources to remove bees from certain spots.  In that case I can understand calling one in, but for the majority of bee problems, a quality beekeeper will suffice.