This beehive had been living in the ceiling of this Mountain Creek garage for about 3 months when we were called in to relocate it. It was an unusual job for us for two main reasons,

Bees don’t often build in ceiling spaces, attaching comb directly to the foil-backed insulation, and

We don’t often see the colony expanding their nest from a ceiling into a wall cavity.

Bees need to regulate the temperature of their brood nest to 34ºC which they can usually do very successfully by vibrating their bodies to create warmth or fanning their wings and bringing in water to cool the hive. Ceiling spaces are not ideal for bees as the temperature can be quite extreme. In fact it can get so hot that the comb can actually start to melt and collapse. Perhaps this is why this colony started to expand their nest into the wall cavity below.

Wall cavities on the other hand are typical places for bees to setup home. They usually attach their comb to the underside of the top plate or to a nog and expand downwards. In a brick veneer home there is enough space in the cavity between the bricks and the inside plasterboard wall sheeting for bees to build three layers of comb if they are parallel to the wall. If they are perpendicular, then they will build long thin combs to fully occupy the space.

In this case the colony had built a reasonably substantial nest in the ceiling and had only just started to use the wall cavity. I think the overall intension of the colony was to start expanding into the wall cavity and probably over time the section of the nest in the ceiling would have been abandoned.