Recently the Guild has gotten some emails and phone calls from people wondering what to do about honeybees living in their homes. For better or worse, our homes make attractive places for honeybees to set up their homes. A swarm of bees may find that little hole in your eaves or in your roof's flashing, get inside, look around and say, "Hey everybody, this is a fabulous place to set up our new digs! It's safe, secure and even insulated! A great place to raise a family!"
While this arrangement may be OK for all parties for a short while, the long term prospects are not all that great for the humans. If bees are living in our walls or ceilings, we may eventually end up with honey dripping through those walls or ceilings into our homes. As you might imagine, this can be a big, sticky mess and the sweet smell of honey may attract other, less desirable critters. Or, we may end up seeing lots of bees getting into our interior rooms, which is also not ideal, especially if the bees set up shop near, say, your baby's new nursery!
So, what's a homeowner to do? First, let's talk about what NOT to do. Do NOT call a pest control company to come and exterminate the bees. All pest control companies should know that, in
Pennsylvania, it is a 2nd degree felony to kill honeybees. Unfortunately, some pest control companies (or homeowners for that matter) ignore the law and go ahead and kill the bees. Given the law, and the state of the declining honeybee population, this outcome is definitely not what we are looking for. Another thing to consider is that if you just go ahead and kill the bees without properly removing the hive, you may end up with other problems (moldy dead bees and honey is not a pretty sight), including the arrival of another colony of bees who is attracted to the site by the smell of honeycomb.
What you want to do as a homeowner is contact a bee removal professional who will come and remove the bees and relocate them to a proper hive. Make sure to ask the person if they plan on removing the bees alive and setting them up in a beehive. You can start by contacting the Guild - we can usually put you in touch with someone who does bee removal. The bee removal professional will often charge for the service and depending on where the bees are in your home, you may end up having to do some repair work as the remover will often have to do some deconstruction in order to get to the hive. The remover will also have some advice on how to properly seal up the place where the bees were living in order to avoid future problems.
Do your part to save the Bees - it's the right thing to do (and it's THE LAW!)
