beehive action!

remember that beehive in my parents yard i talked about before? .. well they called a different beekeeper, one that was way cheeper and was willing to let my dad "keep his fuckin' honey". My dad calls me all excited on Saturday "hey what are you doing?... the bee guy is here he's gonna cut open the hive!" what a nerd, so I go down there and the whole friggin block is in the street in front of my parents house. Its a fucking bee hive circus. so i go up to see whats going on right in time to hear him fire up the chainsaw.
in full bee keeper gear, homedude starts cutting a hole in the top of the barrel/beehive. Then after he gets the bees nice and pissed he fires up the shopvac and starts sucking them off his gloves and chainsaw. Then he starts picking the pieces of the barrel off the top and then pulls out a hunk o' beehive, sucks the bees off and then walks over to us and takes a bite out of it. AWESOME you can do that?! he offers it to us and we all pass it around taking dripping hunks of honey laden honeycomb. sooo good! then he gets back to the action of carefully removing the chunks of beehive from the barrel. vaccuuming up the bees as he goes. (this was a big one)
he pulled out 2 of these big hunks and a bunch of smaller ones. i thought that the 2 big chunks were a lot, then i went in for a closer look.
that thing was solid bees inside! this pic isnt the greatest but all that black you see is bees. there were bees buzzing all over the yard and into the street. I asked him if there was more honey combs inside and he said that he hadnt even got half of them. he continued to pull chunk after chunk out of the barrel, inspecting each one. He was looking for breedable females and the queen. When he couldnt find a queen he said that the they took her to a new hive. The he pointed to a large black clump on a high tree branch above us. "yep, there she is" it was a football sized mass of bees protecting the queen while they scout new locations for a new hive. insane! i didnt know they did that.

dude started getting brave, and for most of the time he didnt wear his beekeeper hat and gloves. one neighbor asked him "you been stung yet today" he calmly replied "yup" what a bad ass old dude! here he is cutting some combs off the wood with his savage rambo knife that he brought.
after he got most of what he could out of it from the top he took the chainsaw to it and sawed it in half. and found this nice hunk.
he ended up filling 4 of those 5 gal buckets with honey filled behive chunk goodness. and now that he let them keep the honey, my mom is gonna extract and bottle that shit!