<p>A LOT of people confuse yellowjackets (which are wasps) with honey bees. They will say, there’s TOO many bees around! But wasps are not pollinators, they are predators, and also, their hives do not persist through the winter.</p>
<p>My parents never told me too much about the wasps and the bees, but I assume the guys who vacuum out know.</p>
<p>In the end, I think the wall will have to be opened up. But who wants to do that with an active hive/nest?</p>
<p>D’yer,</p>
<p>You need to train some other insects, ants, to take care of your bee problem. I had a recurring hive located right outside my sliding glass door in a part of a wall that juts out. I refused to kill the bees since I depend on them to pollinate my avocado trees and I always think there aren’t enough of them. Twice now though ants eventually found the hive in the wall and the bee/ant battle was on! It was quite interesting to watch and I had a ringside seat. The bees fought valiantly but always lost since for every bee there were at least a thousand ants. The bees finally swarmed out of the hive and left it to the ants who quite enjoyed the honey and comb. Eventually the ants left and the bees would end up returning a year or two later per bandit’s rule of bees seeking out old combs/honey. As I say this happened at least twice but after the last time I went ahead and opened up the wall and removed the combs and any residual honey. That solve the problem of them returning to that wall. I still always worry about not enough bees to produce a nice crop for me though.</p>
<p>I hear you, D’yer. The scariest thing this summer (besides the Turks setting fire to the village) was being attacked by a swarm of bees at our dig site, who proceeded to take up residence on the only scrap of shade around. We thought it was a plague of locusts at first!</p>
<p><a href=“Photo Storage”>Photo Storage;
<p>Fortunately, a kind beekeeper came with a bucket and tapped them into it. Of course, that was after our failed attempt to smoke them out. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>warblersrule - Interesting photo! If they were honey bees they are really very harmless when they swarm. But – yikes – it’s still – a LOT of bees! :eek:</p>
<p>I once saw a major league baseball game on TV that got interrupted when a bee swarm flew in and landed near home plate. The game was delayed until a beekeeper came down out of the stands and plucked up the queen and carried her off with the swarm following. This all worked out in favor of the pitchers, because the batters spent much of the rest of the game swatting at stragglers instead of hitting fastballs.</p>
<p>By the way, a caulking gun is your friend if you don’t want to pay someone like me to take bees out of your walls and attic. A couple of years ago a house in CA was bulldozed because the weight of all the comb and honey in the walls and ceilings made it structurally unsound.</p>