Kelli Miguez

Thank you so much for the replies and for all the information!  

I live in southern Louisiana. So it is pretty hot (and humid) here. Area 9 for gardening purposes.  

I went out and bought some cheap wood supplies to make them a box. How big of a hole should I make for their entrance into the box?

Unfortunately it rained hard all afternoon and evening, so I hope they are okay.  We are going to collect the rest of the bees tomorrow morning and we will try the box method instead of the vacuum/bucket.  

And thanks so much for the detailed information about how to make sure bees don't come back.  Last time the bee keeper just said to clean it, but didn't specify how.

Our rental house has bees in the walls on the house.  It's happened before, a few years ago a professional came and removed the bees from the walls and then kept the bees/queen.  After that my husband thoroughly cleaned the area where the bees were so they wouldn't return.  Well, after a few years a new colony set up home in the house one stud over from the original place.  At first we thought it was just a small colony.  My husband didn't want to pay $500 to have them removed again, so he bought all the materials to safely remove the bees.  Our plan was to remove them and then let them free near our garden (different property) and hope they would find a new natural home.  Yesterday we started the process and were surprised by how huge the colony is.  The size was about 16"x48".  We were only able to get about 1/3 of the colony into the vacuum bucket before it lost suction from all the bees.  So we brought 1/3 of the bees and 1/3 of their honeycomb to our house.  We didn't plan on actually being bee-keepers and producing honey, just wanted to help our garden and needed to remove the bees from the rental house as it wasn't safe inside the house anymore.  So we set up a pallet standing up near a bunch of down tree limbs.  We thought the pallet might simulate the environment they were in inside the wall of the house.  and then placed their honeycomb in the pallet.  then let them out the bucket.  This morning they were swarming near the pallet and I saw a lot of the bees inside the pallet, so I am hoping they will make it their new home.

So I realize this is not perfect.  And now that I see how many bees the colony has, I wish we could get some bee boxes and actually do the bee-keeping thing. But we aren't prepared for that and it isn't in the budget to buy all that equipment at the moment. I'm wondering if there is anything I can do to help out this colony so it doesn't die?

Here is a picture of the house were the bees were.  The hole cut is from the last time, this colony is to the left of it and is slightly bigger than the already cut out hole.