When honeybees take up residence in your residence, it can be both a nuisance and scary. Swarms can be found in holes in trees or on limbs of trees. Bees can build an active and healthy hive inside a dwelling with an opening as small as two centimeters. If honeybees move into your home, spraying with insecticides is one of the most inhumane and least effective options.
Even if by some chance the poison actually kills the queen, you are then left with honey comb, larvae, eggs, and dead brood in your wall or eve. Additionally, there is honey, pollen, and dead bees that will attract critters that can cause thousands of dollars in damage.
Hiring professionals to remove the bees ensures that responsible beekeepers will get the nest, bees and queen mother and relocate them to an apiary or bee yard. We also guarantee that if you have a repeat infestation within a year, we will come out and remove them again.
Beekeepers, by law, are not allowed to repair any damages, so we at Glory Bee Farm take time and effort to create as little damage as possible during the removal. Partnered with Mr Bee, Glory Bee has a staff of highly educated, caring beekeepers who get the job done in a timely and professional manner.
We remove bees from any location. We take pride and treat the bees gently without the use of harmful chemicals. We love what we do: saving the world one honeybee at a time.
How do we remove the bees?
Bees that are living inside a dwelling require one of two types of removal. The first option is a cut out. We remove panels, soffits or drywall and carefully remove the nest. Finding the queen is essential as the daughter bees will follow their queen anywhere. We place the nest, one honeycomb frame at a time in a box and leave it at the location until nightfall. As all the foraging bees return, they will automatically go to the box where their new home has been set up instead of to the original location. We move the bees a minimum of three miles. It is possible that the bees can get confused and return to the original home. It takes a little time for their little GPS to reset. We check for any health concerns and disease, and in most cases we requeen the hive to ensure that the genetics are non-aggressive.
If we are unable to cut the colony away, such as a large oak tree, concrete wall or some similar situation, we trap the bees out. It is a time-consuming task, and can take up to six weeks to complete. This method is pretty straightforward really. We place a wire tube at the entrance of the nest and wait. The tube tapers at the end with just enough room for one or two bees to escape. The bees navigate their way out of the dwelling, and they can’t (in most cases) figure out how to get back into the tube. Once they return from a forage flight, there is a new home set up in front of the old exit. We lure them into the box with fresh honeycomb and brood (eggs and larvae). Bees will always feed and nurture brood even if it is from another hive. It is pure instinct.
So…eventually all the foraging bees will end up in the box. Since no food is being brought in, the queen stops laying eggs. As the eggs and larvae age and hatch, they leave the nest. In a perfect world, within about four weeks the queen will follow her family out of the old hive and into the new one. It’s tricky though! Often the bees breach the trap, and figure out how to get food and water into the tree or wall. Once they breach, we have to start the clock over.
Rarely, we use a vacuum to pull the bees out. If we can’t get to the bees…for example bees that set up a home in a column, we will use a vacuum. This is a very quick and easy way to remove them, but it kills a lot of bees. Perhaps up to one third of them die and we can’t take the chance that we will kill the queen with that much force.
Forcing bees from a dwelling is a last resort for us.
For bees hanging on a tree limb or on the outside of a home or business, we will shake them into a box, then measure, cut and place the comb into frames.
How much will a removal cost?
Typically, the price for a removal is done based on hours spent removing them. The minimum fee is $250.00. Trap outs are different because they aren’t time consuming at the front end. We can take a minimum of five or six trips to the same location to check on the trap-out. You can expect to pay anywhere between three and seven hundred dollars for a complex removal.
If you have bees in a water meter, I will come get them without charging the minimum fee. There is room for negotiation to save the bees for the smaller jobs. Those bees are displaced, and we would rather pull them for a minimum charge than have the city spray them dead.
Please don’t ask a beekeeper to remove bees for free.