Bee Extraction from Buildings: What the Job Actually Involve
Bee Extraction
A swarm of bees landing in your garden is one thing. A colony of honeybees that has moved into the cavity wall of your house is something else entirely.
The two situations look similar from the outside. Both involve a large number of bees in a place you would rather they were not. But the response is completely different, the complexity is completely different, and the consequences of handling it incorrectly are significantly more serious in the second case.
This guide covers what happens when bees establish a colony inside a building, why extraction is not straightforward, and what a proper professional job involves.
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How Bees Get Into Buildings
Honeybees do not gnaw through materials to create an entry point. They find gaps that already exist and move in.
A gap as small as 6mm is enough for a honeybee to pass through. Common entry points include gaps around window frames where sealant has failed or shrunk, cracked mortar in older brickwork, spaces around pipework and cables where they enter the building, gaps at the junction of fascia boards and soffits, open or partially blocked chimney flues, and airbricks with damaged or missing mesh.
Once scouts from a swarm identify a suitable cavity, the colony moves in. In warm weather, they can establish themselves quickly. Within a few weeks of arrival, bees will have begun building comb and the queen will be laying. By the end of the summer, a successful colony inside a wall can contain 20,000 to 50,000 bees and have built a significant amount of honeycomb.
Older properties are more vulnerable, and West Berkshire and the surrounding area has a good deal of older housing stock. Stone and brick buildings in villages across the area often have the small gaps and cavities that make ideal entry points, and traditional construction methods create voids that modern cavity wall builds do not.
Why You Cannot Simply Leave It and Why Insecticide Alone Is Not the Answer
Both of these approaches come up regularly and both cause more problems than they solve.
Leaving an established colony alone might seem reasonable if the bees are not causing immediate harm. For part of the year it is. A swarm that moves into a cavity in April and is left undisturbed will build through spring and summer. But what happens in winter matters.
In a mild winter, a honeybee colony inside a wall can survive and grow for multiple years. The comb, the honey stores and the brood that accumulate over time become significant in volume. A colony that has been in a wall for three or four years can have built hundreds of kilograms of wax and honey. When the colony eventually fails or is treated, all of that material is inside the structure. In warm weather it melts. The honey ferments and leaks through walls and ceilings. The wax becomes soft and collapses. The smell attracts other pests. The moisture causes damp and structural damage.
Using insecticide to kill the colony without extracting what is inside the wall creates exactly this outcome. The bees die. Everything they built stays inside the wall. Within a few weeks in summer, the consequences become apparent. This is why treating bees in a wall is not as simple as treating a wasp nest, where the colony dies off naturally in autumn and nothing of significance is left behind.
What Proper Bee Extraction Involves
Bee extraction from a building is a job that sits at the intersection of pest control and building work. It requires understanding bee biology, knowing what you will find when you open up the structure, and being able to deal with what is inside.
Assessment first. Before anything is opened up, the entry point needs to be located and the extent of the colony understood as much as possible. Sometimes this is straightforward. The bees are visibly entering and exiting a clear gap, and the location of the comb can be estimated from the outside. Sometimes, particularly with chimney infestations or large cavity walls, the colony has spread further than expected and the assessment needs to be thorough before work starts.
Opening the structure. In most cases, accessing the colony requires removing part of the building fabric. This might mean lifting floorboards in a loft, removing sections of ceiling, taking out a section of interior wall or, in the case of a chimney, working from above. The extent of this work depends entirely on where the colony is and how far it has spread.
Removing the colony and the comb. The bees themselves, the queen, the comb, the honey stores and the brood all need to come out. The bees need to be managed during this process, which requires protective equipment and the knowledge to work safely with a large, active colony. The comb, which is fragile and sticky and in warm weather can be close to liquid, needs to be removed carefully and disposed of correctly.
Treating the cavity. Once the colony and the comb are removed, the cavity is treated to remove residual bee pheromones. This matters because bees communicate through scent signals, and a cavity that has housed a colony retains those signals for a considerable time. Without treatment, a future swarm is likely to identify the same location as suitable and move back in.
Chimneys: A Specific Challenge
Chimney infestations deserve a mention of their own because they are both common and particularly awkward.
An unused chimney flue is an almost ideal bee habitat. It is sheltered, maintains a fairly stable temperature, is dark, and often goes undisturbed for long periods. Honeybees move into chimneys regularly, particularly in older properties where the chimney pot has not been capped.
The difficulty with chimney colonies is access. Working from above involves descending into the flue, which may not be possible depending on the chimney dimensions. Working from below, through the fireplace, gives access to the lower part of the flue but may not reach a colony that has established higher up. In some cases, both access points are needed.
A colony in a chimney may also have been there for a long time without the occupants realising, because a chimney that is not used is easy to forget about. By the time bees are noticed coming and going from a chimney pot, the colony can be well established.
The same principles apply as with wall cavities: the colony and the comb must come out, the structure must be treated to remove pheromones, and the chimney must be properly capped afterwards.