Removing Bees from an Interior Wall.... A Recollection of What We Did.

Thirty years ago Judith became a bee widow. That is, she lost her husband(me)to the escapades of an Indiana Agricultural Inspector named Bruce who adopted me as a cohort in his beekeeping adventures. Bruce was a wonderful friend, but to Judith -- who was struggling with a newborn baby -- he was a kidnapper who spirited me away on different adventures with wild bee hives colonies.

One of these adventures was the removal of a well-established colony of wild bees that had built a nest in the walls of a rural house. Over a period of about 1 month, Bruce showed me how remove the bees and extract the honey without removing a single nail or board.

I'm remembering this adventure now only because a neighbor has complained of a similar malady of bees. I'm writing down what we did so that, perhaps, I won't be called upon to help. It wasn't that hard, but removing bees from houses is one of those skills that one does not want to publicize. Experience shows that, once known, calls from potential customers come all too frequently, usually just as one is sitting down to dinner.

Here's a description of the house where the bees inhabited:

It was a small single-story cape -- something we used to call a "National Home" -- situated out in the countryside, close to the Michigan/Indiana border. We knocked on the door and were met by a huge man -- well over 300 pounds -- who was gripping a shotgun in his mitt. He didn't seem particularly grateful to see us until Bruce told him that we were there to try to remove the bees. Suddenly he looked at us with a new garrulousness, relaxing his grip on the shotgun and happily asking us to follow him.

The house seemed to have two bedrooms, a kitchen area, and a tiny living room, but the exact configuration was a bit hard to discern because the entire house was filled from floor to waist-height with junked ham radio equipment from the 1950s and 60s. In fact, the only pathway through the house was so cramped that we had to walk sideways through the equipment where we came to the kitchen area. The wall between the kitchen and the living room had been torn down and a huge plywood platform was erected upon which lay functioning ham radio equipment and a disgustingly dirty mattress where the owner must have slept. This was the combined work/home environment of this man. I imagined he ate, slept, and lived on this platform, listening long into the night to other ham radio operators who were strategically stationed around the world. I imagined they too were exchanging news of our arrival as we spoke to the man.

I've got to hand it to Bruce, however, who took in this sight without the slightest expression of perplexity. Bruce was there for the bees, and what ham radio was for this poor benighted radio operator, bees were to Bruce.

"So, where are they getting in?" he asked.

"In?" I wondered to myself. "Is this the place Bruce has brought me? To a crazy den of junk radio equipment, to extract bees from radio tubes and circuit wires?"

"Outside where the electrical service comes in," was the reply. "I wasn't too worried about them last year, although they were kind of noisy. But now they're moving into my receivers, and the other day I got stung."

We wandered outside to where the power line from the Northern Indiana Public Service Company trailed off a pole and arrived at the corner of the house. Sure enough, there was a hole in the wall near the cable through which a steady stream of bees could be seen coming and going. It was clear that this was not a new colony, but one that had built up over years and years of casual neglect. The noise of their coming and going was very loud.

We returned inside and, stepping over the mounds of equipment, made our way to a small closet adjacent to the power service entry. A few bees were confusedly coming out of a couple of small holes in the wall. Bruce knocked on the wall tentatively, and we heard a loud increase in the level of buzzing through the wall. I thought to myself that, had he knocked much harder, the particleboard walls would collapse and there we would be, facing a very large, very angry colony of wild bees, our exit path hindered by the bulk of this huge man and the tons of radio receivers in our way.

Fortunately, the wall held.

"Okay," Bruce smiled. "We'll have these out of here in no time at all!"

"Are you gonna have to tear down the walls? Cause I don't have no place else to go."

"You'll be fine! But it will just take a little time."

Later, on our way back that evening, I asked him what he intended to do to get them out.

"We'll rob them out," Bruce said. "And I think we'll get about 200 pounds of honey at the same time."

The next evening found us back at the house with section of wire screen deftly rolled into a funnel, and an empty hive body with a couple frames of newly capped bee brood. We also had a few nails and some wood. We searched for all the holes in the side of the house where the bees were coming and going, and carefully stuffed them all with rags, except the main entrance.

Here we fitted the screen cone, wide-side in, over the entrance, tacking it up with just enough nails to make it solid. Since it was twilight, the majority of bees were already back in the walls. Bruce and I then jury rigged and attached the empty hive body against the house itself, using a two-by-four and a couple of ropes. We slipped the brood frames into the hive body, closed it up, and headed for home.

The following evening we returned to the scene. The bees had become confused by the reconfiguration of their entrance. The worker bees had found their way out of the colony through the wire cone, but now could not figure out how to get back in. They were amassing on the outside of the screen, and eventually found their way into the empty hive with the brood frames. We had brought a new queen with us, in a queen cage, and now placed it atop the brood frames. This was to attract the bees who could not get back into their own colony.

Over the next week the homeless bees migrated into the new hive body. They released the queen from her cage and took care of the brood that was beginning to emerge. In about two weeks, only a few new bees -- bees emerging from the brood inside the walls of the house -- were exiting the cone. The rest of the colony was now successfully relocated to the new hive body.

Finally, Bruce returned to the house, removed the new colony, with the new queen, and smoked the old colony with a heavy dose of sulfur smoke. This killed the old queen and all the brood that still resided in the house. After a day or two, when he was certain that no bees were coming out, he removed the cone from the side of the house. But there was a problem.

Inside the walls of the house were still the honey and the beeswax comb.

So he returned the colony that had origianlly come from the walls and set it outside the house. The bees found the honey, robbed it completely out over three days, and moved it entirely to the new colony. Then Bruce carefully patched up the side of the house, and took the new colony home.

When I asked him about the old brood and the remaining wax in the walls he said that, over time, wax moths would set up a colony in the walls and consume the wax very rapidly. He didn't think it would be a problem for the radio operator at all.

So that's how we -- actually mostly Bruce -- removed the bees. It was a neat trick. You should try it. Just don't call this bee man. Judith doesn't want to be a bee widow again.