My next blog was supposed to discuss my North Africa trip in more detail, but a more interesting and pressing topic has come up. I'm now back home in California for the summer. When I came home, to my surprise, I learned from my parents that we had a bee hive atop our living room chimney. The bees starting trickling into our house about a week ago. They would come down the chimney and go to the nearest window, where they would shortly die. Recently, I discovered a second hive in a hole in the wall on the outside of our house, near the second chimney. In fact, I can see these bees from my room. We called a bee exterminator in to assess the situation. The exterminator killed the first bee hive by spraying a chemical from the roof. Next he used a laser gun / thermometer to detect the location of the second hive. The hive could be found from our master bedroom's bathroom - a temperature of 85 degrees could be detected at certain places in the wall (whereas 77 degrees at other parts of the while were normal).
This second hive is still operating, and we are deciding what to do about it. I suspect that this bee hive has been there for a few years. We are reluctant to exterminate the bees because, quite simply, they are not harming anyone. When the exterminator killed the first hive, he may have killed 3000 bees or more. This was hard to bear. The second hive may have 15,000 - 20,000 bees. We were hoping that the bee professional would bring a second hive and entice the bees to enter the new hive. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Also, when the hive is exterminated, the chemicals contaminate the honey. On the other hand, we don't want the bees to somehow burst into the house. We also don't want the bees to attract hornets, which are known to kill bees and steal their larvae. Another strategy is to leave the bees alone for now, and close the hive in the Fall when the weather cools down.
As luck would have it, the exterminators also found a small hornet's nest in a nearby overhang, which we ripped down. Apparently, the wasp problem is expected to grow in June when the weather becomes hotter. Our bee problem lead to my spending countless hours on YouTube learning about bees. This of course lead to watching videos on wasps, and then videos on lions vs. tigers, lions vs. hyenas, etc.
What do you think we should do about the second hive?
3 comments:
What was the verdict? Did we end up exterminating them?
In the end we exterminated the second hive. We ended up finding 9 honey combs behind the wall, indicating that the bees had been there for over a year! The space where the bees had gotten in from the outside has now been blocked off.
How sad but I guess it had to be done!
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