Free Bee Removal
You have been warned!
I get many requests from people looking for free bee removal, which is a little puzzling to me. Removing bees alive from roofs, walls and the multitude of other places they build their hives is a difficult and specialized process. Often the bees are in a place which is difficult to access and therefore entails skill and time to achieve a safe removal.
Of course the alternative is to call an exterminator who can kill all the bees by spraying insecticide into the hive. I’m yet to find an exterminator who will do this free.
Once an exterminator has done his work and the bees are dead, bees from other hives in the neighborhood, and hives belonging to local beekeepers, will find the unguarded poisoned honey and either add themselves to the pile of dead bees moldering inside your wall, or carry the lethal honey back to their own hive with drastic consequences.
There’s another problem the exterminators don’t understand or tell you about, apart from the impact on our precious bee population, they don’t consider what will happen to the potentially large amount of honey which can remain inside the roof, wall, ceiling or whatever. I’ve seen beehives in a roof containing approaching 100lbs of honey.
I was call to a motel a couple of years ago, an exterminator had killed a colony in each end of the roof of the building. The temperature had subsequently reached 105°F, the combs had sagged, leaked and the, now poisoned, honey began dripping out of the roof. The manager had placed a five gallon bucket under each end of the roof to catch the honey.
If you engage a beekeeper to remove the bees, hive, comb and honey you will be doing the bees and the environment a service and will not end up with honey dripping through your ceiling.
People assume the bees have a high intrinsic value and the acquisition of another hive of bees should be reward enough. I’m afraid it just isn’t! In areas where there are feral colonies which cause these problems it is likely there isn’t a shortage of bees. Remember that the beekeeper has to pay for gas to get to you, possible more than once, pay for the equipment required to access the bees and for the hive in which to put the bees once they’ve been removed.
Not all colonies which are removed survive. It is quite a traumatic process for the bees. One often doesn’t know whether the bees to be removed will be as docile as they appear once their home is torn apart.
There are many other ways of obtaining bees much more cheaply than offering free bee removal of bees of uncertain origin from your home. Sometimes new beekeepers will remove bees just because they want the bees, do you really want an inexperienced person, who is probably not insured, conducting this delicate procedure?
My suggestion is that you leave this page about free bee removal and look for a local beekeeping expert.
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Bees-On-The-Net 2014
