Leaving or Poisoning Bees

Poisoning or leaving bees in your house ?
Aside from the much higher potential for getting stung by having this close an association with the bees, there are other reasons why you need to remove them. The nest is attractive to a wide range of rodents and ants which feed on the honeycomb. The nest and leftover materials will also provide a breeding ground causing an explosion of bugs including wax worms and the latest pest, the African Hive Beetle, in your home. Lastly, on very hot days the wax can begin to melt causing the honey to run in your home, becoming a problem.

Removing them alive is much more effective because an experienced beekeeper will be able to identify exactly where the bees are in the structure.

A six story nursing home had bees under the cap of a brick wall. Poisons have been used to try to get rid of bees causing wax worms to move into part of the hive and bees to go into a robbing frenzy, leaving this mess behind.

A very important point – regardless of how the bees are removed, either alive or dead, you MUST have the entire hive removed as well. Discuss this with the company you call for service.

In a normal healthy honeybee hive the working colony will keep most insects and rodents away, and they also keep the wax honeycomb in place. Once the bees are no longer there Click To Expand Text

the wax will melt on hot days, releasing the stored honey to flow into the wall voids and probably through the walls and into your home. The worker bees are able to create a breeze by “fanning”, when the temperatures get too hot, and they create a kind of air conditioning to keep the wax cool enough to stay solid.
In addition, once the bees are gone, the ants around your home will think they’ve gone to Heaven when they discover the treasure of honey inside the walls, along with all the dead bees larva there will be a parades of creatures feeding in the walls for quite a while. The dead bee larvae and pupae also will begin to rot and smell. They become attractive to Mother Nature’s little cleanup crew, which includes Carpet Beetles. There’s no sense in allowing these guys to get any closer to your wool sweaters than absolutely necessary.

A typical Honeybee hive can have over 100 pounds of honey stored in the wax honeycomb after just its first year in that location! It’s attractive to ants, cockroaches, yellow jackets, and other honeybees. It must come out, and unless you are into wall construction and repair, you might want to contact a professional.

Here we have a newer colony of bees that moved into the roof by the front porch of this Sugar Land home.

Why shouldn’t I have someone kill the bees? Again, even if you or someone you hire pumps insecticide into the wall and successfully kills every last bee in there, you have the secondary problem of dead larvae and attractive honey still inside. This must be removed and physically opening the wall is really the only option.

Are they in a wall, floor or soffit of your house? You probably will want them removed. That entails opening up the space they are in, Click To Expand Text

cutting the entire comb out, and gathering up the bees and filling the space afterwards with something to make the space unattractive to future swarms of bees. Pick a beekeeper with lots of experience at this. It is quite involved and needs to be done right in order to avoid a future problem and a horrible mess. In rare instances it is better to sacrifice the bees if they can’t be removed, but need to be gone. Please get a second or third opinion before you choose this path. With diseases and parasites challenging bees for their survival and our need for them to pollinate our food, killing them off willy-nilly is like cutting off your own arm. Poisons introduced into one hive of bees can be spread by other bees if they transfer what is left when you destroyed the colony.