Here is a unique story of a bee removal I did, both because of the size of the swarm and because it involved an answer to prayer that I am going to tell you about.
An extremely large honey bee swarm visited a Panera Bread in Atlanta not too long ago. I would estimate there were 30,000-40,000 bees. It could have easily been over 10 lbs. of honey bees. This swarm was so heavy that it partially broke the branch that it landed on. Rather uncommon, as I have only seen several swarms this big out of the many jobs I have done. A good sized swarm is typically half this size. The original colony that this swarm came from must have been massive.
Although the bees were 25 feet off the ground, they were in a high traffic area and needed to be removed asap! A pest control company Southeast Bee Removal works with, referred the job. Southeast Bee Removal is licensed and insured. As a beekeeper, I rescue and relocate the bees instead of killing them.
As soon as I arrived on site, I could see it was going to be difficult to remove the bees because a car was directly underneath them. The only way I could get my ladder in position to reach the swarm, was if the car was moved. I asked around and had the manager check inside Panera Bread to search for the owner of the car, but the owner could not be found.
I was sitting in my van wondering what to do. By now, I had been there for about an hour with no solution to the problem. I wanted to be able to rescue the bees and I also wanted to get paid for the job. At that moment, I prayed and asked God to send the owner, wherever they were, to move their car. I had scarcely finished praying this prayer in my mind, when I see someone walking up to the car and getting inside. The was a direct answer to the prayer I had just prayed! I was amazed!
As soon as the car drove off, I set up my ladder and had the bee swarm removed in short order. Then they were transported to our apiary, a.k.a. honeybee yard, where they are doing very well!
Southeast Bee Removal has done many bee removals in the North Georgia mountains. I used to live in Blue Ridge and keep bees hives there. Now that I live near Atlanta, I still move bees up north for the delicious sourwood honey harvest as do many other beekeepers. With all the trees and flowers, honey bees have no problem thriving in this region.
Many times when I get a call to remove bees here, the bees are in a log cabin. Many of the houses are log cabins. These houses require extra care when removing the wood siding or tongue and grove paneling. With the use of the right tools we are able to remove the wood and repair the access area where it is barely noticeable that any work was done.
These honey bees I removed in McCaysville, GA were in a cabin. The bees were located in an outside wall next to the chimney. There was no insulation in that part of the wall, leaving plenty of space for the bees to make a home. Any time there is insulation in the walls, honey bees have a hard time making a nest because they just don’ have enough space. They have to look elsewhere.
A knot hole in the siding had fallen out providing the bees access to the cavity. Once the honey bees entered the knot hole, they went straight to the top of the wall. Honey bees prefer to build their nest from the top down when they move into a cavity. It less work for them to do it this way.
A side note, is that sometimes wood peckers will also make holes in the wood siding as they search for carpenter bees and other insects that have burrowed into the wood. These holes give bees access to make a nest and should be sealed to prevent bees and other pests from entering.
The job in McCaysville was pretty straight forward for a bee removal. I removed the entire hive, put everything back together, and sealed the knot hole and the gaps between the chimney and wood siding, and gave the bees a new home back at my apiary.
We offer professional honey bee removal and relocation services to all of North GA. So if you have bees in a structure or log cabin that you need removed and do not want exterminated we are your company! We have fast service. If we don’t answer the phone, it is often because we are on the job extracting a bee hive. We do are best to check messages regularly and return calls and emails as quickly as possible.
It may surprise you to know that honey bees are attracted to salt water swimming pools. This is most prevalent during times of the year when the nectar flow is not as strong, typically early spring (Feb. – March) or later in the summer (from July on). I have done bee tracking before in an attempt to solve this problem. Normally, I do not take jobs like this because of the difficulty and the likelihood that the bees are on private property. However I wasn’t super busy at the time and the owner was very insistent.
He had just installed a very nice, expensive salt water swimming pool. His family was having a hard time enjoying it because honey bees were coming to the pool and drinking the salt water. I picked a cloudy day to track the bees because when looking up at the sky the bees are much easier to see against a cloudy sky. All the bees were going in one direction when they left the swimming pool after taking a drink. I headed in the direction that I saw the bees flying.
There were houses everywhere and roads and lots of trees. I was about to give up but decided to drive down one more road. As I did, I saw a house that had about 7 or 8 bee hives in the backyard. The house was a half a mile away and it lined up exactly with the direction the bees were flying away from the swimming pool. While I found the location of the bees, I do not know the end of the story, I only hope these neighbors were able to work things out.
Here are some things you can do to try to minimize honeybees coming to your salt water swimming pool:
In my experience, there is a much higher probability of the bees being owned by a beekeeper verses finding them wild in a tree. Find the neighbor that is keeping the bees and kindly ask them if they could move them. I would only suggest this if the bees are a real nuisance and pose a threat of stinging.Unlike wasps and yellow jackets, honey bees are gentle and will generally leave you alone. Many cities allow the keeping of honey bees within city limits so it may be difficult to get your neighbor to move their bees.
Ask the neighbor to have a supply of water that the bees can drink from. It seems that bees prefer dirty pond water over fresh water though any water source is better than none.
Put out pie pans filled with sand and then fill just up to the surface of the sand with water from your swimming pool. The idea is to that the bees will choose to land on the sand and drink the water that way. Every day move the pie pans several feet back. Do this every day until the bees are away from the pool. This is a way to train the bees to go to the pans instead of the pool. If you miss a day of filling the pans with water you may have to retrain the bees.
Here is an account of the oldest honey bee colony I have ever heard of, located in Rutledge, GA about 45 minutes east of Atlanta.
It was Ms. Sandra Verner Latimer, who contacted Southeast Bee Removal for the job:
“My family’s ancestral home has had honeybees in the front corner of the porch and half-column against the wall of the house for as long as I can remember and I am 67 years old. My grandmother was born in the house in 1880 and she told us the bees were there when she was a child. I also grew up there and remember several times when my parents had local beekeepers try to remove the bees without success. I know they finally let the exterminator try, but even then, the bees came back.”
The beam that supported the porch roof was filled with dripping honey comb!
I knew this bee removal job was going to take a long time from the very start, and it did. It took probably twice as long as normal job because of the size and age of the hive. Old hives have dark almost black comb that is tough and extremely difficult to scrape out. The amount of comb I pulled out was enormous. It equalled a five gallon bucket of honey and two huge contractor size garbage bags full.
I often am asked how long can a bee hive survive someone where? People want to know if the bees will go away if they leave them alone. Honey bees can last for years, and in this case, over a century. Their resilience is really quite amazing. Although a queen’s life span is only a few years and worker bees only live around 30 days in the summer during the nectar flow, they are able to continually replace themselves. Honey bee hives constantly raise new queens to replace the old ones. The queen bee, if a good one, can lay up to 2,000 eggs a day. So the worker bees are replaced as well. As long as the bees have good honey stores and are able to fight off disease they can live in a place indefinitely.
Roof above porch also filled with very old dark comb.
Why were the bee removal attempts unseccessful and why did the bees always come back to this house? The reason is this, the void was left vacant after the comb was removed. Also, the cracks the bees were accessing to get in were not sealed properly. Honey bees have a wonderful sense of smell and can easily find where an old hive has been in the past. If the old home was left “vacant” a new batch of bees will most certainly move in. What Southeast Bee Removal does is this: we fill the void with fiberglass insulation which leaves no space for the bees to build another hive. There just isn’t room. We also make sure the cracks and gaps are sealed. With houses that have had honey bee problems in the past it is a good idea to check for gaps and cracks every few years, because the wood can rot and things can shift.
Inexperienced beekeepers and some pest control companies may think the job is done if the bees and comb are removed or the bees just killed. This is not the case. Sealing the area where the bee hive was at, is just as important as removing the bees. Keep this in mind, when hiring a bee removal company to remove bees from your home. Ask questions to find out exactly what services will be performed.
Another section of the porch roof that had bees and comb in it. The comb extended about 6 feet back total from the bees’ entry point.
There were actually two hives at this job, about 10 feet apart from each other. The bees from the orginal location had split and expanded into the porch column about 10 years ago. It was a strong healthy colony of bees.
Southeast bee removal removed all the comb and bees from both hives, did the repairs, and sealed all entry points.
2nd hive of bees in porch column
It was really neat to be a part of a bee removal with such rich history, and I took the utmost care to the best job that I could.
Ms. Latimer, told me that it was a little hard parting with the bees. “I’m already feeling like we’re going to miss these bees. They have been such an ever present part of our family life, it will be strange for them to be gone!”
Though hard to see the bees go, she and her family were happy that the bees were relocated and not killed, and would be well taken care of!
Their new address: Southeast Bee Removal’s bee yard in Fayetteville GA.
Are you wondering wether you need an expert to remove a bee infestation or if you can tackle it yourself? Here are some things to keep in mind. Your are likely dealing with any where from 10,000-60,000 (or more) bees depending on the size and age of the hive. Removing honey bees from a structure is labor intensive, requires a good deal of knowledge, and can result in many stings if not done properly.
A one week old hive containing 20,000 bees.
The following methods do not work well for getting rid of honey bees.
1. Using soap and water and other “deterrents” to get the bees to leave.
These do little to get honey bees to move from any location they have chosen as home. Even if you have only noticed the bees for a day it is unlikely you will get them to budge.
2. Spraying 3 or more cans of wasp or bee killer at the entry point.
Spraying the entry point may kill a few hundred bees, but the bulk of the nest (up to 60,000 bees or more) is inside, behind insulation and walls and floor boards. The pesticide will unlikely penetrate far enough back to do anything to the bees. Even if you were successful at killing all the bees, there could be substantial honey comb and bee larva in the nest that will make a mess unless it is removed.
3. Seal the bees’ entry point.
All this does is keep the bees from coming and going freely. You wont sees bees on the outside but the bees are still alive and probably have plenty of food and air to live a long time. The bees will begin looking for other ways to get back out. Many times they will start coming in the home. We have seen bees come in a home for more than 8 weeks straight after their entry point was sealed shut.
A colony containing 30,000 honey bees and 50 plus pounds of honey.
4. Try to smoke the bees out.
I have seen this tried and it failed. Smoking bees is great for beekeepers working in the own hives in the backyard. However, if you smoke bees in a house, it usually drives them further into the house. Another problem with trying to smoke the bees out of a house is that it can be dangerous. You don’t want your house to catch on fire. I have seen a burned up shrub that was against a house, burned up from someone trying to smoke the bees out that were in an overhang above it.
5. Kill the bees, remove the honey comb, and repair the access area.
Mission accomplished, right? Not necessarily. Unless the area is sealed properly, the pheromones left by the first hive will attract other colonies in the future. It is very likely bees will keep coming back. On one house the bees came back to the same spot three times in a matter of 5 years. The last time the home owners decided to call Southeast Bee Removal instead of doing it themselves. By the way, Southeast Bee Removal does live honey bee removal and relcoation with their removals and recommends trying to save the bees as a first choice. In most cases the bees can be saved.
6. Wait and see if the problem goes away on its own.
I am an experienced beekeeper and I love bees, but I would not want them in my house. I have seen all the problems and damage they can cause if left alone. There is a possibility that someone would get stung. Also, the older a bee hive is the bigger and more difficult it will be to remove. Furthermore, the colony of bees will likely swarm in the spring (half the hive leaves and moves to a new location), and you risk having them moving into a second spot on your home or into your neighbors home.
These are some of the biggest no nos you want to avoid when considering what to do with a honey bee colony that has taken up residence in your home or business.
If you need advice/help in removing a honey bee colony you can contact Southeast Bee Removal for a free estimate. We have lots of experience (we have removed 1,000s of bee hives) and love our job!
