50,000 House Guests

Last night, the wonderful bee keepers came to our house around 6:30 pm and left at 10 pm with tubs full of bees, honeycomb and honey! Thanks to Swarmbusters we have 50,000 less house guests. Their card says, "Who you gonna call?" Funny! I guess you've got to have a sense of humor when you're a bee keeper.

When they arrived, they listened to our walls with a stethoscope to determine where the largest concentration of bees were. They decided to go out the upstairs window and onto the roof and cut a hole in the siding to get to the hive.


They were looking for the queen but never found her. They cut out the bee-covered honeycomb and filled up at least two Rubbermaid tubs with the sticky stuff.


Once they got all of the honeycomb out, they used a shop vac to vacuum out the remaining bees. Thank you so much, Steve, Roxi and Vern!


Stuff I learned about bees (that I didn’t know I wanted to know):

• Bee removal experts hope to find the queen but only find her 1 in 10 times. If they do find the queen, all the other bees go to her which makes moving the hive much easier.
• It’s against the law in Michigan for an exterminator to kill honeybees.
• Older honeycomb is a dark, almost brown color. New honeycomb is very light yellow, almost white.
• Honey bees really do only sting once and then they die so they only sting as a last resort. They will sometimes dive and bounce off of you, as a warning.
• Honeybees have different jobs - think Bee Movie. There are guard bees that stay outside the hive. Guard bees have the most venom. The worker bees that usually always stay in the hive have only a little bit of venom and then there are the drones (male bees) that have no stinger. The bee’s stinger can continue pumping venom into it’s victim for 30 seconds which is why it’s important to get the stinger out.
• All male bees do is eat honey and mate with the queen. Once they mate, they die. In the winter, all male bees are kicked out of the hive to starve and die.
• The worker bees only live 8 weeks. So the queen is having babies all summer. The baby bees look like a grub or maggot. They are put in a chamber in the honey comb and sealed off until they are mature.
• In the winter, the bees generate enough heat to keep the hive at 90 degrees. They live off the honey they made until they can make more honey in the spring.
• Honey is only gathered once or twice a year. Usually in July and then maybe in the fall, if there was a good August crop and the bees were able to get food from the blossoming plants.
• The hum of 50,000 stirred up bees kind of sounds like the hum of a fluorescent light bulb.

What an adventure! I must admit I was amazed what these little bees could accomplish and the flawless design of their honeycomb. They are truly the ultimate graphic designers. They're just not allowed to work at my studio!

Bumble bee, bumble bee...

Actually, they're not bumble bees. They're honey bees and they are living inside the wall of my 140-year-old farm house. Yikes is right! I spoke to a bee keeper today who said there could be 20,000 bees in my walls. Double yikes! Luckily, we're not living in the house at the moment because we are trying to renovate it and sell our condo.

Dustin, my hubby, and I walked into the kitchen of the house on Sunday to discover at least 50 dead bees on the floor. Wondering where they came from, we walked around the house to discover this scene:


The picture will never do what we saw justice. I went out and bought the "spray at 22 feet away" RAID and sprayed them. The bee keeper told me, "all that stuff does is make them mad." Which is exactly what I witnessed. In his opinion, our only option is to have an exterminator come out and kill them. So now I have a headache from having talked to and mostly, left messages for, exterminators and bee keepers. I had one exterminator tell me that I should call other bee keepers just to get some different opinions as to if they really needed to be killed or if they could be removed. The first bee keeper said that it would be an eight week process to remove them! The really crazy part of all of this is that once the bees are gone (dead or alive), we're going to have to take the siding off and clean out the honey comb and all of the honey or else more bees will come. I guess "if you build it, they will come!"

We also had trees removed and trimmed. Here are the before and after pictures. Again, it's hard to tell in the pictures what a huge difference there is.


Happy Renovating!!