Honeybees

The Honeybee colony is an incredibly fascinating and intricate society, and Honeybees are examples of bees that we call "social" insects. Within the colony there is a Queen who lays all the eggs, workers who care for the eggs and larvae, and who also do all the work of making and maintaining the nest, finding food, and defending the colony from enemies. There also will be Drones, or the male Honeybees, but they are chased out of the colony and exist only for the purpose of mating with new Queens.

The Honeybee colony will contain only a single Queen, but in order to ensure new colonies can begin and the populations can grow, new Queen bees are produced each year. All the Queens except one will leave their parent colony, to fly off and establish their own colonies somewhere else. As they leave they take a large "entourage" of worker bees with them, and you may have seen this exciting dispersal flight as what is called a "swarm", often in the warm days of early spring. This can be a pretty frightening thing to be in the middle of, as hundreds or thousands of bees suddenly are flying around and past you as you are walking down the street.

However, at this time there is very, very little chance of getting stung, for the workers at this time are not defending anything in particular, and have no instinct to attack you, unless one gets trapped in your clothes and feels personally threatened. The swarms stop each day to rest, usually as a huge ball of bees with the Queen somewhere in the midst of all the workers, and from this blob workers will venture off in different directions looking for an appropriate cavity to offer their Queen as a potential new home. There are interesting incidents where the swarm chose someone's car as the resting site, or even, possibly a person who stood still too long.

I've got a swarm in my tree!!! What do I do?

The best course of action, should you one day discover a football-sized clump of bees in a tree in your front yard, or perhaps on the fence, is…..nothing. Actually, I'd suggest you wander out and just appreciate this marvelous sight, for in a day or so the bees will leave again. The tree limb and fence are not good nest sites, so all they are doing is hanging out while the workers look for a better place.

If this is of great concern to you, however, and you have the right not to have the bees in your yard, you could call a local beekeeper, and ask them to come and remove the bees. Quite often professional beekeepers are happy to add more bees to their commercial hives, but they also may have concerns and refuse your offer. Wild colonies of Honeybees potentially can be infected with mites or diseases that can kill them, and if they are brought into the clean colonies the beekeeper already has these problems can be spread. However, give the beekeeper a call, and if they want the bees they simply come out to your house with a container, and scoop the bees right into it.

Your third alternative is to have the bees killed, but it's always best to try one of the first two alternatives and allow the bees to survive. If removing the bees by having them done in is the best choice for you, then call a licensed professional pest control company. They will have the special clothing and equipment needed to do this work without getting stung.

The Bees are coming out of the walls of the house - now what?

It is very common for the worker bees to stumble upon an opening that leads into your home, possibly a crack between layers of the siding, around window framing, openings that give access to phone cables or electric wires, cable TV lines, etc. Any small opening that leads into the wall voids can be a potential doorway for the bees, and you may not even be aware that they've all moved in until much later, when the hive is already well-established. If you have a bee colony living within your home you absolutely should have it removed, and once again the options are to kill them or try to remove them alive.