How To Get Rid of Bees

Wherever you find flowers, you’ll find bees doing their job as nature’s pollinators.

But if your home is attracting large numbers of them, they can quickly become unwelcome guests for you and your family. North America alone is home to more than 4,000 kinds of bees, and there are over 20,000 species around the world.

Bees are among the most social of creatures. Honeybees live in colonies of up to several thousand – practically a small town. Those colonies are built on a caste system that includes the queen bee, female workers, and male drones.

If you’re worried about a colony near your home, it’s important to know the difference between bees and wasps – for the purposes of both pest control and treating stings. Elimination methods vary, and it’s possible that a license will be required to remove a bee colony due to the chemicals or treatments involved.

• Wasps’ bodies feature narrow waists, four wings, and bright colors, often with black or yellow patterns.
• Like wasps, bees have two pairs of wings. But bees are much hairier insects (relating to pollination) with more rounded bodies and more black or brown coloration.
• Though bees might sting if provoked, wasps are more aggressive by nature and more persistent when challenged.

Bees are acrobatic and surprisingly swift flyers, reaching speeds of 12 miles per hour or more. This can make excluding them from your property more difficult. Before you begin the work, you’ll need to know which species you’re dealing with.

Even without training in pest control, there are some common sense steps you can take to determine what kind of response is needed for a bee population near your home.

All bee activity slows during winter, but of the three species we’ve covered, only honeybees do not hibernate. In fact, the fall and early winter serve as the start of a new year for honeybee colonies. The queen lays eggs to replenish the previous year’s losses and to prepare for spring. One sign of an expanding colony is a cluster of bees at the front of the hive as the days begin to warm.

For hibernating bumblebees and carpenter bees, winter is about survival. You’re unlikely to see much activity near your home as insects stay in their nests and tunnels. When they emerge with the start of spring, their goal is to expand their homes or find new ones in which to raise their young.

A bee extinction could mean losing all the plants that bees pollinate, all of the animals that eat those plants, and so on up the food chain. Groceries would have half the current amount of fruit and vegetables. In fact, the global human population of 7 billion may not be able to sustain itself.

Unfortunately, we are much too close to this potential outcome. Colony Collapse Disorder is bringing us even closer to the brink. National Geographic defines this as “a phenomenon that occurs when the majority of worker bees in a colony (hive) disappear, leaving behind a queen, food, nurse bees and baby bees. Without the mature worker bees to bring nectar and pollen back to the hive, it collapses (dies).” While the rates of Colony Collapse have slowed somewhat over the past few years, the concern is still all too real.

A cautious approach to bee management is crucial. Never automatically assume that bees are a nuisance. In fact, many people actively encourage a bee presence in their landscape by planting bee-friendly specimens, and familiarize themselves with native bees, which rarely pose a pest problem or sting humans, in order to help them thrive.

Some people can have a severe allergic reaction to bee venom. This includes dizziness, fainting, vertigo, headache, vomiting and even convulsions, according to the Mayo Clinic. If you or someone in your family has an allergy, you will want to take stronger steps to prevent a bee presence on your property. In the case of allergies, it’s also important to look into obtaining an epinephrine autoinjector to have on hand, which can stop deadly allergic reactions in their tracks.

Whatever approach you do decide to take will depend on the bee species on your property and what types of trouble they’re causing. Make sure you have properly inspected and identified the pest problem before choosing a treatment method. The severity of your problem can vary, and you may even be dealing with paper wasps, hornets or yellow jackets instead of bees. There are also many different species of bees that behave differently, such as bumblebees, Africanized honey bees, and carpenter bees.

Also consider leaving your lights off at night if possible. Light attracts bees and a range of other insects.

A few of the most common issues that arise with bees include:

• Tunneling into your home. Carpenter bees setting up shop can weaken your home’s foundations and support structures and should be removed immediately.
• Building hives in your home. If bees are able to make their way inside your home to build hives, this can ruin your home’s structural integrity. When filled with honey, hives can weigh anywhere from 20 to 100 pounds, or even more. Imagine that pulling on the inside of a wall, ripping out insulation, and destroying other structures. The honey itself damages many home-building materials as well.
• Stinging. If you or family members are stung frequently or suffer allergies, consider removing or relocating a hive. Pets are also susceptible to bee stings, and some are allergic.
• Swarming. While we associate the word “swarming” with any cloud of insects, it actually has a specific definition when it comes to bees. Swarming is when part of the colony breaks off with its own queen and leaves, en masse, to form another colony elsewhere. Because their queen is on the move and they are temporarily homeless, bees tend to be more aggressive at this time. As swarming is a temporary activity, you are unlikely to experience an ongoing problem with it. The exception is if there’s a large colony nearby that frequently outgrows its home and sends part of the colony packing.

Even if it’s frightening to see a lot of bees in your yard or notice a nest, their mere presence isn’t necessarily an issue. There are several different treatment options you can use, and bees shouldn’t be killed unless they’re truly causing a problem. Your first step should be prevention, and then you can move on to treatment if your prevention methods haven’t been able to stave off an infestation.

One bee has no impact on the colony as a whole. In any case, most bees won’t sting anyway unless they are disturbed. Swatting at them or being menacing in other ways is one of the best ways to guarantee a sting, because it puts the bees on the defensive.

Swatting and killing one bee could also make your problem worse, because they’ll release pheromones when they die and alert other bees in the area. The other bees that arrive will be aggressive even more likely to sting than the lone bee you swatted at.

If a bee lands on you, remain still and wait for it to go away. Instruct children that the proper response when encountering bees is to walk away slowly or wait for them to leave. If you encounter a bee in your car, calmly pull over, open the windows or doors, and wait for it to leave. While you may guide it out, avoid swatting.

To deal with a large infestation, you can use the following methods:

This DIY trap offers a no-kill solution, so you’ll have to check the trap daily and carefully remove the bees away from your home. The bees will get stuck in the small amount of syrup but won’t drown. While it isn’t encouraged to use a trap that kills bees, you can add enough liquid to drown them you feel it’s truly necessary.

These are all items that bees are averse to because they don’t like the smell, so leaving them outside near your home can help keep bees away.

The methods we’ve outlined are all proven to help prevent and treat a bee invasion on your property. Some of these treatments are dangerous, and unless you know for sure that you’re capable of performing them, you should never attempt to deal with bees on your own. While they are typically not aggressive creatures, they are likely to sting and even swarm if they feel their home is being tampered with or their queen endangered.

A much better approach is to call an exterminator. For the most part, these professionals will not need to use insecticides, because bee colonies are rarely dangerous in and of themselves. The whole job can usually be done without ever spraying or using a chemical. Experts have the necessary knowledge to assess the situation, determine if the colony can/should be saved, and remove it with the least possible danger to everyone nearby so that you don’t need to worry about stings.