You have not lived until you have spent a Texas summer day laying on your stomach in a short attic doing a bee removal.
Even with the bee suit, you still get stung, you are pouring sweat and the sweat just mixes with fiberglass insulation and honey all over your body. And then there is the buzzing, it’s constant and deafening, and you continue to hear it for days.
She’s pretty much up bee creek with no paddle. Been through this in two different homes. Sometimes the walls have to be rebuilt. If the bees still smell the honey they will attempt to come back. For years. Sometimes even if there is no honey to smell, and the ways in are sealed, they will still return to the former hive by “bee gps” and when they can’t get in, buzz there until nightfall then drop dead. This happened at our last beach house, where each morning out by the garage, right under the place on the second story where there ONCE was a bee hive, we would need to sweep up 50-100 dead bees. They didn’t return to where they came from; they just flew like helicopters in place outside the place until their wings gave out and died.
It sounds like the removal people they hired did a really sloppy job, came in and just removed the bees but did not remove the comb, etc. As beekeepers, we get calls to do honeybee removal, but will turn down the job if bees have already built comb in a structure in a hard to reach area. In that case we refer them to someone with the knowledge and tools to do a complete clean out that most often requires cutting out parts in the structure and rebuilding afterwards. Part of the responsibility lies on the homeowners to do regular maintenance inspections on their homes and be aware of any evidence of bees going in and out, if you catch it early before they build a lot of comb and store a lot of honey you can avoid the problem this lady had.
Add some red dye and you’ve got yourself an instant horror flick film set.
I once lived in a place that had a huge tree in the lot. Inside the tree was a truly gigantic bee hive with bees coming and going through a big knot in the tree. The bees were very aggressive and took to chasing people through the yard. I waited until winter and cemented the knot closed. Felt bad about the bees but enough was enough. To have removed the hive was impossible.
