ok heres my question… the mom says they checked the room because you know toddlers but didn’t hear anything for weeks … beekeeper says they’d been there for 8 months … Iam I missing something because I can hear when 1 bee is in the house … …?
Maybe she has bad hearing?
Or, maybe the room is loud (fans., A/C, etc.)
Mom probably has some degree of hearing loss. Kids can hear sounds that are not detectable by adults
(Nod to @beowulff )
FWIW, I have a lot of experience with bee colonies. Over the years I’ve had bees in trees, in walls, in gas grills, in old equipment, etc, etc. In my experience, the hives don’t make much noise. They make a low humming sound - not like individual bees flying around.
I have had a beehive in my walls. It became pretty damn obvious.
It wasn’t loud as in somebody shouting loud, no. But it buzzed. And it smelled. And bees started coming out into the insides of the house, in significant numbers; not hundreds of them inside the rooms of the house, though I expect there were a couple of thousand inside the walls, but ten or twenty bees buzzing around inside even a sizeable house at any given time are hard to miss. Especially when you put a hand on one accidentally and get stung; or the cat does, and is suddenly across the room yowling.
The bees were in the walls, which will muffle and distort the sound somewhat. I have a friend who had the same problem. Unless you actually see bees coming and going from a crack in the foundation or a gap in one of the windows, it takes a lot longer to diagnose 50,000 bees than you’d think.
Would any of the honey be edible? that would be about the only consolation… I could see
My question too. Honey is anti-bacterial and AFAIK pretty clean. I reckon if a bee-keeping type person captures the Queen Bee and her possible replacements (princess bees?) and put her in a nearby bee box the others will all soon come along.
And no matter what you do with the honey, I think it has to be entirely extracted else other critters will have found a food source they will consider edible.
A friend of mine had a hive in the eaves of her house, and allowed the bees to co-exist for several years. She and her family eventually moved out and were renting the house, and the renters knew about the hive but evidently did not care, either. When bees started occasionally appearing in the house, something had to be done, but my friend, having somehow bonded with the hive, refused to have the hive destroyed and the bees exterminated. She found a bee wrangler to remove the hive without destroying the colony, and then hired someone to patch the sheetrock. She was expecting more honey, but it seems once the hive is threatened, the bees suck up as much honey as they can as the prepare to flee. So now she has what she calls her “$10,000 jar of honey” as a souvenir
Next chapter: toddler hears bears in the walls.
Probably a Pooh bear who gets his head stuck in the wall.
I had a Yellowjacket nest in my wall once. It’s 2 story wall with cedar shingles, so really difficult to see where they were getting in. My office is on the second floor, and they started getting inside my office.
I know Yellowjacket nests don’t get nearly as large as beehives can get, but this must have been pretty big for a Yellowjacket nest, because every day for months I’d get about a dozen wasps in my office, buzzing up against the glass door wall that was just behind me and to my right. I’d take a small piece of wood and methodically crush each one. I must have killed hundreds of them over the course of the Summer. Surprisingly I never got stung. I never heard any buzzing coming from inside any part of the wall though.
Fortunately wasp nests don’t overwinter like beehives so they haven’t returned.
I ate some of the honey that came out of the hive in my walls; though the beekeeper who finally got them out kept most of it.
Possibly; though I’d think there would be a risk that they’d just all move back in, or keep going back and forth. But whatever you do, don’t let the beekeeper attach another hive to the house in the hope that the bees will all move into it; at least, unless they do something significantly better than he did. They did not move out of the house, they just increased in numbers, and it got even worse inside.
They told me it had to be entirely cleared out or else the scent would attract some other batch of bees to move in. (We also sealed up the entry hole. But bees don’t need much of a hole.)
I wouldn’t be surprised if other critters might also be an issue; which ones depending on location.
I’m extremely surprised that you never got stung. Usually, crushing one is a great way to make all the others in the area attack you.
I routinely have wasp nests outside under the eaves of my house – more than one kind of wasp, but mostly paper wasps. We have what I consider a mutual non-aggression treaty: I leave them alone and they leave me alone. When an occasional wasp gets into the house I either trap them in a cup of some sort and put them outside, or occasionally vacuum them. I’ve never had a whole nest move into the house itself, though I have had it happen in the back hall (that outer door’s often left open in summer; I need to keep a screen over it. I hope the dog’s grown past the stage of eating the screen.)
I was surprised at that too. I had heard that if one gets crushed it releases ‘danger’ pheromones that send the others into attack mode. The first time I killed one I made a dash for the doorway in case they got agitated, but they never took notice of their fallen comrades. Maybe they only go into attack mode in close proximity to the nest, and having gotten in my office they were disoriented.
Just to add to the “bees in walls” stories, my cousin lived in a condo and heard what she thought was trickling water inside the wall. Had her father come over who also mistook the sound for water and assumed the upstairs neighbor had an AC unit leaking. Opened the wall and (of course) BEES!!!
Inside the wall was one giant hive with my cousin never noticing the bees coming and going from the outside because the it was an upper floor and how often do you stare up at your 3rd floor window and look for bees? Had to get an exterminator in because now the condo was full of angry bees.
Golly. My “Bee Lore” was that they will follow the Queen and if she is somehow indisposed there are others ready to claim queenhood.
Smoke and otherwise invading the hive causes the “alarm” signal which means “eat up as much honey as you can and prepare to flee. In the general direction of the Queen/consort/whatever”
If any honey is left in an otherwise ruined hive I’d think it the last place a new Queen would want to set up shop. I was thinking ants and rodents when I said critters.
That, “eat as much honey as you can” reflex is why beekeepers often smoke hives before opening them up to extract the honeycomb. Bees who are full of honey can’t bend over into “sting” position, and are much safer to work with.
(A productive hive has way more honey than the resident bees can eat at once.)
I’ve never had a beehive in the house, but we had an enormous yellowjacket nest between the beams of the roof and in the walls. It wasn’t a big deal until fall, when they started to get into the house. They were in the walls of my ensuite bathroom, and … it’s not ideal to have a couple of yellow jackets buzzing around your bathroom. We decided it was late enough in the season we’d just wait it out, as yellow jackets abandon their nest each year. (I guess most of them die, and the queens start a new nest in the spring.) It took longer than we thought. And it became a HUUUGE nest. Two years later, when we had that bathroom re-done and it was stripped to the studs, the contractors were freaked out, and took photos.
Did they share the photos with you, or did you take any? It would be interesting historial info for the house.
The little girl in the story certainly seems well bee-haved.