<p>Had a bit of excitement at our house yesterday. A week ago, my daughter and I were shocked to see one of our upstairs windows covered with a thick layer of bees. After looking around, we discovered that hordes of them were going in and out of a tiny crevice just below our roof. The Bee removal company came yesterday and the hive actually extended into our attic crawl space for several feet. He removed approximately 35 pounds of honey and honey comb (some of the honey comb sheets were the size of a cookie sheet) as well as all of the bees that were humming in the attic. He then sealed off the opening with the warning that the bees still out the field would probably form a baseball-sized cluster at the former opening when they returned. (Which they have). </p>
<p>The scary part is that the hive was dangerously close to the duct for our airconditioning unit that runs along that part of the crawl space and the bees would likely to have gotten in there in time. By the way, he said the hive was probably less than two months old. So, keep an eye out – if you see bees going in and out of any spot on your house, get it checked!</p>
<p>Raid makes a super awesome spray that kills bees on contact. We had a bee problem at work and I sprayed the stuff and probably 40-50 bees just died and fell out of the crevasse. Exterminators make earn there money thats for sure.</p>
<p>We developed a hive in the covered space for the sprinkler controls. Come to think about it those big green boxes that we stick in the ground are about the size of a bee hive that the commercial apiarists use.
A neighbor had bees in her living room from the chimney. The bee keeper came to her house in his cut offs and flip flops. He said that he had to find the queen and take her outside and all of the other bees would follow. He told her that the queen is difficult to spot and would require a thorough search of the living room. The homeowner immediately spotted a bee that was different from the others, “Do you mean like this one?”
The bee keeper took the queen out to a hive he had prepared on the front lawn, opened all of the windows in the living room and by the next morning the house was free of bees</p>
<p>A friend of ours bought a house and, while doing renovation work, found a beehive in one of the internal wall. Bees are protected a agricultural species here, so you cannot just call the pest control guys (who came anyway to let our friend know that, and that will be $50, thank you very much). So he had to get a beekeeper to remove the hive and relocate it in the countryside. As to us, we were visited by a squirrel who got into the crawl space between the second and third floor. When the pest control people put up a metal mesh to prevent it from getting back in, it waxed very indiginant for quite a while. For several years, we also played host to a skunk :(</p>
<p>LOL! These are all great stories. One more: my Dad kept a burlap sack of old rags in his garage. Getting ready to wash his car one day, he went into the garage and reached into the rag sack — and literally pulled out a baby raccoon. They both just about died from the shock. :)</p>
<p>We had a raccoon at work, so I know what you mean. Those things are like rapid dogs when caged up. When animal control took him away and the ladies in the mailroom found out that it was going to be euthanized, they flipped out. Same people who were scared when was in the building.</p>
<p>Two days ago I noticed a bee going in a small crevice of fallen out mortar in my house of brick. It was carrying a perfectly cut portion of a green leaf. Leafcutter bees are building a nest behind my wall making a home for a handful of new ones…not a hive but a nest…but still not something to encourage! No one at Lowes or at the Extension office or in my landscaper’s crew has ever seen Leafcutter Bees before. We live on the edge of a forest. People with rosebushes sometimes notice them tearing up rose bush leaves, but that is not the only shrub they like to cut up.</p>
<p>I live on the Blue Ridge Parkway of Southwest Virginia on the edge of town…
Googled them and learned their sting isn’t as bad as a honeybees and they are solitary nest builders (females) and valued by gardeners and farmers who need pollinators.<br>
Not as close a call as your rather dramatic Hive!!! whoa! So glad you noticed in time. I am going to do a better job of securing my property all in the next period of life while we all adjust to missing our launching eldest. My property has several “invitational” aspects to critters at the moment.</p>
<p>carolyn:
Were they honey bees or yellow jackets? Often, exterminators will try to move honey bee hives to a bee keeper because they are so important. Yellow jackets are just plain horrible. They can break through the walls of your house with their moist excrement and suddenly you can have literally thousands of them in there! They tend to build up huge hives later in the summer and early fall and are really aggressive. Only the queens live through the winter. These are the annoying wasps that wreck picnics.</p>
<p>Anyway, most likely if they were in your house they were yellow jackets (technically a wasp not a bee). But, if anybody thinks they may have honey bees - those should be rescued and moved not destroyed.</p>
<p>Glad you got the bees out! We have armadillos living in our next door neighbor’s yard. One day my husband came home and found an armadillo swimming in our pool and when he went to fish him out with a net, he jumped 3 feet up and out into the deep end. He finally got him out and put him over the fence into the neighbor’s yard - hehe.</p>
<p>We once had a squirrel come down the chimney and tear up all the mini-blinds. We were out of town and got back to the mayhem and found him dead on the couch. Oh, the smell…</p>
<p>I’m way too familiar with the odor de dead squirrel…
We had one get stuck inside our living room wall. Of course, we didn’t know anything was amiss until a strong smell began emanating from our living room. For awhile we assumed it was our cats who had decided to mark some new territory. After much cleaning (still smelled), putting
a nose to the wall pinpointed the location.
My husband ended up cutting three large holes in the drywall (we were “off” in targeting the first two times!) and lo and behold–dead squirrel, well into decomposition phase.
It took a couple of months for the smell to completely dissipate. And we couldn’t close the hole until after we treated for the smell. Made for a really attractive holiday season at our house…</p>
<p>A few years ago we had a rat problem in the attic. (Heck, we had a rat problem everywhere. The dog caught many many rats.) Unfortunately one died right over the kitchen - began smelling at Thanksgiving and continued through the new year. We never did find it.</p>
<p>Well there are bees (my wife kept a hive for a decade) and then there are the africanized BEES that have ate up more than one rancher around here. I had a bulldozer guy on the place for a few months and he had the great pleasure of meeting a swarm one day. He looked just like Oscar Bonavena ( or “Rocky” after a beating for you non early seventies fight fans). It was awful. Both eyes swelled shut. Hideous colors. I felt bad docking him for the time off. Not THAT bad. But bad.</p>
<p>Carolyn, how amazing! Did y’all get to watch the guy at work? Keep any honey? How industrious those insects are. Glad no one got hurt, and that they did not get into the air conditioning!</p>
<p>We’ve had BATS before. They had built a home in the attic when we built a new house (they like peaked roofs) and got into the house via recessed lighting. Talk about yucky. They are an endangered species, of course, and kill lots of insects you don’t want, but they carry rabies sometimes, and you sure don’t want them in your house. The exterminators had to remove them alive, take them five miles away from the house, then fill the attic with a dehydrating substance (poison) in case they ever came back. That stuff was all over everything in the attic. Not fun!</p>
<p>some people around here ( well farther out) actually build houses to encourage bats to nest- they eat bugs
We don’t get too many pest around here- too many neighborhood cats for many rodents- although we have lots of crows when the cherries are ripe, too bad cats don’t have wings ( remember those books?)</p>
<p>Funny…I thought pest guys usually waited until after sunset to spray the nest–thereby making sure all the bees are tucked up into bed before they are zapped.</p>