Carol Stewart says she had no idea more than 40,000 honeybees were lurking behind her drywall.
Last summer, her and her husband noticed bees – sometimes dozens at a time – disappearing into the eavestrough outside their Kitchener home.
Afraid of where the bees could be going and what they could be doing, she began to contact exterminators.
“They can do a fair amount of damage if they get into the inner works of your house,” she says.
Eventually, Stewart became connected with David Schuit of Saugeen Country Honey.
Schuit paid a visit to her home, and was quickly able to determine what was going on.
“We could tell, listening to the wall … it was definitely bees in the wall,” he says.
On Tuesday, Schuit and his children – beekeepers themselves – returned to the home.
Opening up the wall, they found an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 of the insects.
“I was expecting a nice little Winnie-the-Pooh hive. There were thousands of bees,” says Stewart.
“If I had known then what I know now, I’d have been a lot more anxious and concerned about getting these bees out of my house.”
Schuit sprayed the bees with sugar water to calm them down, then extracted them and their hives from the home.
Had the Stewarts waited until later in the year, when the hive would have been at its full size, Schuit says, they could have been dealing with as many as 90,000 honeybees.
He estimates that the hive’s queen is laying up to 2,000 eggs per day at this point.
Schuit says spring is the best time of year for homeowners to look around their home for cracks or crevices and plug them to prevent the arrival of a honeybee hive.
