First Removal of The 2024 Season
Thousands of honey bees who had lived just on the other side of the sheet rock for several years
Temperatures are above 55, the sun is shining, flowers are blooming and honey bees are on the move. That means that at Southern Maine Bee Removal the calls and emails start rolling in. I performed the first removal of the season yesterday down in York County. The homeowner informed me that she had been seeing bees coming and going from the gap between her chimney and wood siding. Conventional wisdom says that bees prefer small entrances to their hive but these bees appeared to be coming and going from a vertical crack nearly five feet long!
I stepped inside and immediately I could hear the bees through the sheet rock in the living room. The wall at about chest level was warm to the touch. I have seen other professionals use thermal cameras to find bees hidden in walls. In this case that was far from necessary. All you needed was to touch the wall and you knew exactly where these honey bees had set up their operation. I circled the home and discovered that the bees had chosen to build their hive in the bay directly behind the brick chimney. This meant that an extraction from the outside would be impractical at best and overly destructive to the siding, wall joists and integrity of the wall at the worst.
Honey bees coming and going from a long gap between the siding and brick chimney
Because the exterior entrance was out of the question, I helped the homeowner to seal off the living room before beginning to cut into their living room wall. I made three cuts and when I made the forth to complete the removal of a square in the sheet rock hundreds of honey bees came pouring out. From there I was in the zone and proceeded as I usually do. I sucked as many bees as possible into my bee vac and removed their comb into sections so that they could be reattached to frames and installed in their hive back at my apiary. Based on the size of the colony and the dark color of the honey comb I estimate the hive had been there a minimum of two going on three years and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was closer to three or four. The comb was stuck to the top plate of the wall of the first floor and had been built down to about the height of the bottom of a standard window. Some 5 feet long by 16 inches wide. The siding had been attached with long staples and the bees had used the staples as cross bracing making their comb very tough and sturdy. As I neared the end of the removal I discovered an inch wide gap in the plywood siding material that had provided the bees access to the back of the chimney and subsequently the crack I had seen them exiting from.
As I began to work I noticed an off putting smell. I love the smell of honey and honey comb but something smelled like poop and I couldn’t find the source. Ignoring the poop smell I finished the extraction and returned home with the bees and honey comb. On my way out I commented to the homeowner that I had not found any insulation between this set of studs. It was only on my return trip to re-sheet rock her wall and remove any straggler bees that I discovered the smell and the lack of insulation were related. When I leaned my head into the open wall bay to check from debris left in the wall I discovered that there was some insulation in the wall. The bottom of the wall held about eighteen inches of insulation completely soaked in mouse poop and filled with mouse droppings. The mice were long gone but before they had been professionally removed by the homeowner they had removed nearly all the insulation in the wall. I filled my shop vacuum twice before the wall was clean. After that it was just a matter of sealing the crack in the plywood siding, adding insulation, and closing up the hole in the sheet rock.
The entrance to the hive as seen from the inside of the home post removal of comb
Honey bees never cease to amaze me in their abilities to work hard and use what they find in nature to their best advantage. In this case the mice had cleared out a perfect spot for the bees. No insulation to remove, protected by the brick chimney and warmed from the inside in the winter by the humans keeping their house warm. A perfect place to grow a large healthy bee colony. Even more amazing maybe, that in the millions of knot holes in Southern Maine that might have lead to a good situation like this, these honey bees found this one and were able to colonize it.
At the end of the day I had another happy customer, my gear was covered in sticky honey, and some 50-60,000 bees had a happy new home. Few other jobs are as satisfying.
Do you have a house that is being utilized by honey bees? If you do or suspect you might you know who to call!
