Some time, probably in July, 2000, we had a swarm of bees decide to move their hive to an air vent in our chimney. This was one of those vents that you use to get outside air in to the fireplace to help the fire burn. Note that the nest was not in the flue, but in the gap between layers of bricks that make the interior and exterior of the chimney. We didn't have much trouble with them coming in through the vent and only occasionally had one show up inside the house, so there wasn't much incentive to do something about it.
Eventually, we did ask our pest control people to get rid of them, but they don't deal with bees and instead gave us the numbers of a couple of bee removal companies. Still, we didn't do much. Then in August, we were gone for several weeks, then school began, and so forth.
So by now, it's early September, and the bees are starting to get more troublesome. I eventually got around to calling one of the beekeeper numbers our pest people gave us. They came out and rigged it up with a box and one-way access, so the bees could leave the chimney hive but couldn't get back in. Instead, they would tend to nest in the hive.
Well, this pissed them off and both Eric and Carol got stung that day. And they were nowhere near the hive when it happened. The bees eventually calmed down, but we were still a bit shy about letting the kids play outside.
So the box would fill up and the beekeeper would come and remove some of the trays from inside. This, of course, would piss the bees off again and they'd get aggressive. In fact, one day, the mailman threatened to not come by anymore! So the beekeeper replaced the box with one that was sealed and the bees could no longer get out. We started letting the kids play outside again.
So this past week, the beekeeper came and removed the box altogether, leaving only the tube that prevented them from getting back in to the chinmey vent. Not exactly sure why -- maybe they got the queen? There are still quite a few bees swarming around, as these pictures illustrate, but they're not terribly aggressive. Still, it would be better to be rid of them entirely!
So this past weekend, probably in response to my phone call, the beekeeper came back and left another box. It's no longer connected to the tube on the chimney, but I guess it makes for a place where the bees can reside instead of swarming around. There's much less buzzing around over there now.
Well, somewhere along the way, I stopped updating this, so I'll have to reconstruct the remainder of the incident from memory.
Within a couple weeks of the aggressive incidents, I finally got fed up with having irate bees swarming around. We'd been trying to get these things taken care of in a bee-friendly way for several months by then, and I'd reached the end of my rope. The beekeeper, too, was frustrated with this particular hive. So we decided to escalate.
One quiet morning, the beekeeper came by and removed all her hive and all. She then pulled out a couple cans of household fogger that kills flying insects. We blocked off the inside vent with a piece of wood, then she proceeded to empty both cans into the air vent. She finished up by securing some fine wire mesh over the air vent grate so that bees could neither enter nor leave the chimney. She warned us that we might notice a pungent smell as the remaining carcasses and honeycomb proceeded to rot.
The constant buzzing was gone. The remaining bees outside quickly departed to greener pastures. (Or perished; I'll never know. And we had no more stinging events. And the rotting smell the beekeeper warned us about never appeared!
This incident has left a bad taste in my mouth. While the beekeeper did her work as best she could, and with only good intentions in mind, I'm pretty certain that I'll skip straight to the escalation stage should I experience another infestation.
Interestingly, my web server access logs show that this bee story is one of the most popular pages on my web site! Before I had written the conclusion to this story, I received the an email from another bee removal specialist who was quite surprised at the method of removal. I sent this reply, then updated this page so it was more descriptive of the initial scenario.