My friend found another hive setup in the floor of a piece of industrial equipment nearby. They were going to rebuild the equipment and wanted the bees gone.  Imagine an ISO shipping container with two layer thick plywood and a load of bees setup underneath.

I can see a few of them, I wonder how far back they are?

Oh boy, that is looking like a lot of bees!  There was a lot of equipment inside that couldn’t be moved, so I had to do some creative crawling and cutting to get into the floor.  Lots of cutting and prying later we had pay dirt!

There was about a foot of space between the two floor bars, and they went back about 4 feet from the outside wall with comb and bees.  We came up with a new technique for getting the comb back home.  Put them in empty frames, and use string to bind it in place.

This worked really well.  One person would hold the frame upright and keep the comb in place while the other would wrap the string around.  At first we were trying to be really careful with clove hitches and half hitches to keep it all together.  After a while, everything got so sticky in honey that you could kind of just wrap a few times and it would all stay put.  Hopefully the bees will expand that comb out and cement it in place.  Later they will either chew through the string, or you can remove it yourself.

There were a lot of bees around.  I will try to update in a few months when they get well established to see if the string trick works.