Photo: Sushaaa (Shutterstock)
Bees are nice. Bees do not want to bother you. Bees just want to make honey and feed it to their children, who in turn want the same for their own children. The only real problem with this is that they can have a lot of children.
If you find a swarm of bees, that’s good news: bees travel in large, calm groups, and they don’t tend to sting when they’re swarming because they have no hive to protect. If there’s a swarm and it doesn’t move on, call your local beekeeping club and somebody will be happy to show up and claim a free bee colony.
On the other hand, bees can take up residence in your walls, and that’s when you may have a problem. The bees will mind their own business (bzzzzz-ness?) while the hive grows to include hundreds of pounds of honey, wax, and bees. To fully remove the hive, the University of California says, you may need to have a contractor and a beekeeper work together to open up your walls and remove all the bees and honeycomb. There’s a cheaper option, but it’s even worse: get an exterminator to poison the hive. All will be well until the piles of bee corpses begin to rot, and the honey absorbs moisture and ferments, and all of the above begin to leak through the walls. They’re still full of poison, remember? Anyway, enjoy.
