QUESTION:

I guess we all know to remove the honey and hive after exterminating honeybees. It surprises me at how fast other bees and insects will move in to collect the honey. But, what if you can't get to the honey? Case in point is a recent job I did on a 5th-wheel RV type mobile home. You darn near have to tear it apart in order to get to all the honey. These mobile homes are a common habitat for bees and in my small bee control experience I have run into several infested RV's. My question, is there another method of dealing with the old hive other than removal?

ANSWER:

The awful truth is that the honey should (must) be removed in some way, and therein lies the problem. In looking at a few resources from Beekeepers Associations there do not seem to be any good hints on how to get the honey to be removed by other bees, and of course allowing the honey to remain within a void in a structure is an open invitation to other honeybees to attempt to colonize the same place. Ants will certainly detect that that remaining honey and, once the bees are eliminated, will also move in to enjoy the feast. If you are in a region that gets hot in the summer the wax comb will melt without the bees there to maintain it, and the honey then flows wherever it darned well pleases, creating a major mess that is going to be a lot more expensive to repair than if the hive and honey had been removed right away.

The amount of honey might be minimized by waiting until very early spring to eliminate the bees, as they feed on the honey all winter long where it is too cold for them to continue to forage. But, less honey is still honey, and one way or another that hive will need to be located and the area opened for physical removal of it. The entire area of the hive should also be scrubbed well to remove all traces of odor of the hive and honey, or it could continue to be an attraction to other insects. In addition, simply killing the active bees and stopping at that point still leaves a lot of pupae in the hive that will develop on through to new adult bees, and there is a possibility that these new bees could regenerate the colony.

So, there is the dilemma that needs to be told to the owner of that RV. One way or another the hive has to come out, and this means opening the wall to get to the hive. You might be able to narrow the search for the hive using a digital camera on a tube, where you can slip the flexible extension tube into an opening in the wall to take a look inside the void. I have seen these cameras available in stores now for very little money, and you can view the scene right on the small attached digital screen. If you are unsure where the nest is this can really help, and then only the necessary wall materials need to be removed to get to the hive. Once the hive is removed and the wall repaired, ideally by a licensed contractor who knows how to do this kind of destruction and repair properly, a careful inspection of the exterior of this home can be made to see what exclusion steps can be taken to prevent more bees from invading in the future.

Again, looking over those beekeeper websites and university websites on dealing with honeybees in walls, they all more or less apologize for the fact that dismantling the wall is going to be needed. Leaving the honey there just leads to too many other problems. I suggest that anyone doing honeybee removal have this advice in writing, and have the customer SIGN the contract to indicate that they were advised of the need to have the hive removed. If it is not in writing and they fail to take that step they could come back and blame you for not telling them of the problems, and in court the sympathies could just lie with the victim - that homeowner now facing major repair costs.

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