Do you have a large number of bees flying around your property but can’t find a hive? Perhaps you are looking in the wrong places. Pest control experts have found bee hives in pots, chimneys, trash cans, bird houses, attics and other locations that are not obvious.

Bees are great for pollinating, so if they are far enough away from human activity typically no action is required.

If  you happen to pass by a swarm or even just a few don’t make any sudden moves because that will make them angry.  Bee hives and ball room dancing simply don’t go together. Africanized honey bees have been known to attack humans that get within a hundred yards of them. 

If the bee hive is situated close to a doorway or perhaps a window don’t be surprised if they join you while your eating butterscotch pecan cookies on your sofa. Also, the bee hive could get accidentally bumped and turmoil might ensue. 

If they have made a nest in the walls, that can lead to damage and the honey will attract other insects as well as the pompous grizzly bears living in the sewer system (just a silly rumor).

A bee control professional can safely eliminate the bee hive.

A home owner discovered she had thousands of honey bees in the inside walls of here home. I give her permission to yell “Oh the Horror! The Horror!” at thirty minute intervals.

Who is responsible for this invasion? Well I could easily blame the Queen bees. In the month of June the Queen gets bored with her residence and leaves her comfortable hive and  the rest of the bees begrudgingly or perhaps happily follow her to her new location which can be the inside walls of your home.

The homeowner realized there is a shortage of honey bees in the world for pollination purposes, but was saddened to learn the cost of  having bee keepers remove them was five times more expensive than hiring a pest control company to exterminate the honey bees.

However, exterminating or removing the honey bees will not end the problem. Hundreds of pounds of honey can easily be left in the walls which attracts other pests. Thousands of ants in the walls is not easy to deal with either.

Call a bee control specialist at the first sign of an infestation because “home sweet home” doesn’t make sense  if it’s accomplished by honey bees.

The 4th of July is nearly here and that means picnics: burgers and dogs on the grill, gallons of lemonade, enough potato salad to split a gut, chocolate cake and ice cream — and bees. Lots of bees. Buzzing around the lemonade cooler, crawling into your glass, strafing the dessert table. Unwanted and unwelcome, bees never-the-less put in an appearance at every 4th of July shebang.

This 4th of July you can expect record numbers of the pests to dive bomb your outdoor activities. The mild winter allowed more bees to survive. When it stays cold for protracted periods, “bees will eat all their honey and starve to death,” explained beekeeping specialist James Tew of Ohio State University. While not good news for picnickers, it’s great news for farmers who depend on bees to pollinate crops. Last year, a mysterious disease called Colony Collapse Disorder decimated bee populations nationwide. This year bees appear to be recovering.

But for those allergic to their stings, bees, wasps, yellow jackets and hornets can mean death. For the rest of us, they’re a considerable nuisance. No one likes to be stung and aggressive buzzers can ruin a good picnic. Before you host the family this 4th of July, check the overhangs and eaves on your house and outdoor trees for hives. Wasps can build huge paper hives between the branches of evergreens. If you find a problem, call in the bee experts at Stern Environmental Group. Bees turn angry when their hive is disturbed and angry bees go on the attack. This is one for the pros!

Recently a bee keeper removed thousands of bees and buckets of honey from inside the walls of a home in Elk Grove, California. At first the homeowners thought the buzzing might be an electrical problem but soon feared bees had moved into their bedroom walls. “I heard the buzzing, louder than my electric toothbrush,” homeowner Jennifer Ferkel told the local CBS news station. “I turned it off and then I heard the drones.”

An estimated 40,000 honeybees were found living behind the dry wall and insulation of Ferkel’s home. Honeycombs built between the wall studs yielded about 5 pounds of honey. Let than a month old, if left untreated the bee colony would quickly have doubled in size.

The Ferkel’s problem isn’t as rare as it might seem. Ten years ago, honeybees found their way under my neighbors’ siding in Chicago with similar results. My neighbors not only had to replace the siding along one side of their home, but also the wallboard in two rooms that had become soaked with honey. It took much longer to completely remove the sickening smell of fermented honey that permeated their home for months.

If you hear buzzing in your walls or ceiling or start finding bees in your home (they can  enter through electrical sockets), call a pest control professional immediately. Click here for more information on bees and wasps.

Spring brings sunshine, warm breezes, blooming posies — and bugs. Insects are at their most prolific and most active when the weather heats up. Ants, bees, hornets, wasps, roaches and bed bugs are gearing up for summer and your home may be party central. If you’re not keen on sharing your domicile with a host of creepy-crawlies and their friends, you may need to call in a pest control professional to handle the evictions. How do you decide when to call and who to call? This week we’ll share tips on hiring a pest control company.

First you have to decide what’s eating you. The problem may be obvious. You may see a trail of ants across your kitchen floor. You may glimpse something scurrying under the fridge when you turn on the light. You may see fat bees buzzing around the eaves or spy a wasp nest under construction. But what if you suspect a problem, but can’t figure out the cause? Even worse, what if you wake up with itchy red welts? How do you figure out what’s biting you?

Try putting heavy-duty double-sided tape or glue traps on kitchen countertops, under sinks, and around windows, doors and headboards to see what sticks. Zip your catch into a plastic bag or dump that mystery bug into a small jar of rubbing alcohol. Take you catch to your local cooperative extension office or a pest control company for identification. They can tell you what you’ve got and how to get rid of it.

Hundreds of flighty Bee-listers swarmed the Upper East Side of Manhattan yesterday causing havoc at 75th and Second Avenue. But it wasn’t a low-budget film run amok that had people buzzing. This was a weird freak of nature more appropriate to the deep woods than a city sidewalk.

Frantic phone calls to 311 reported a cloud of bees swarming area bus shelters and creating general panic along sidewalks. Spectator Bill Orfanon described the noisy swarm “like debris, floating around in a whirlwind. It was pretty amazing.” 

Police contacted the Bronx Zoo for help which sent bee-keeper Jim Fischer to the rescue. Garbed head to toe in protective gear, the bee-buster arrived with a smoker box to calm and contain the bees. When finally under control, the tightly-packed colony covered the entire side of a newspaper box. “It’s how they reproduce,” Fischer explained. “Somewhere around here there’s another hive of bees. This one broke off and followed the queen.”

While bees are beneficial to nature, a swarm can pose a serious danger to humans. If bees are buzzing you, contact a pest professional for safe removal.

If you have noticed large black bees flying about your residence or boring holes in wood structures you may have been selected as the new resting and breeding place for carpenter bees. Typically they are noticed with the arrival of Spring. The males don’t have stingers but the females are equipped with one, however they rarely attack humans. They look like bumble bees but the upper portion of their abdomen is void of hair and is shiny black while the bumble bee has a harry stomach which features yellow marks. It should be noted that I have not actually inspected bee bellies.

Carpenter bees can be a big problem due to creating tunnels in wood items to lay their eggs. They prefer unpainted and weathered soft types of woods, particularly redwood, pine, cedar and cypress.

If you are searching for carpenter bee nesting locations make sure to inspect the eaves of the house, wooden shakes, window trims, decks and your outdoor furniture. The holes are quite round. If the site of the nest has been used for years, extensive damage can occur.

Prevention consists of painting wood surfaces. You may need to hire a professional pest control company to get rid of your carpenter bee infestation.

Anyone on the east coast of the US has probably seen them. They are big, slow flying, hairy bees that are a major pollinator of open faced flowers and like to live in wood. Sometimes that wood is in trees or shrubs, but sometimes it can be in the wood in your house.

Carpenter or “wood boring” bees are considered solitary bees and live in tunnels they drill in wood. Many times they or their progeny return to the same place and live in the same holes year after year.

Certain times of the year, especially in the spring, you can see these giant bees slowly flying around your house or hanging around, almost hovering motionless around your eaves. These are generally the male carpenter bee and they are protecting the entrance hole to where their mate lives.

Male bees will sometimes buzz you, but they don’t have any stingers, so though it seems scary, they are pretty harmless. The female bees, which are the ones that do the real damage, do have stingers; but they are not very aggressive and generally more interested in foraging for food. They will generally only sting if really provoked.

Although carpenter bees are solitary bees, they are gregarious and like to live near one another. The damage they do is to make nests by tunneling into wood. They do this by rasping their mandibles (mouth parts) against the wood and then vibrating their bodies. They can drill nearly perfect circular holes in a beam or facia board that is about the diameter of your little finger. This tunnel serves as a nursery for their young as well as a storehouse of pollen for them to eat.
A good way to spot if you have carpenter bees is to look for the “spray” or grayish to black drip-like discoloration that fans out on the shingles or siding below where the bee hole is located.

Although you can eliminate these bees yourself, it is a tedious job. One way is to squirt insecticide or boraic acid into each of the individual holes and then fill them with caulking compound and then repaint the wood. If the infestation is bad enough the wood might have to be replaced.

In the case of carpenter bees or any other wood destroying insect, it is always best to call a professional so that you can be sure that the job is done right.

Anyone who has ever picnicked in the park has experienced the dive-bombing and swarming of yellow jackets. Yellow jackets are aggressive predatory wasps that have yellow and black or black and white striped bodies and are about the same size as a bee, but skinnier and less hairy looking.

Like bees, yellow jackets are social insects that live in colonies, but a lot smaller than the ones bees live in. Like bees, yellow jackets carry a nasty stinger, but because it is not barbed, they can sting repeatedly while a bee can only sting once. Although annoying at your picnic as they buzz your ham sandwich and potato salad, they are in fact beneficial insects because they prey on other insects.

Yellow jackets eat a number of things. They can capture and chew up insects (or your lunch meat), but they also have a long proboscis for sucking nectar, fruit, and other juices. Yellow jacket nests are generally found in trees or shrubs where they are in a protected environment. They can also be found in human structures such as attics, hollow walls, inside flooring, in sheds, or under porches or house eaves. Some even live in abandoned mouse burrows or in cavities in the soil. Their nests are made from chewed up wood fiber.

In the spring, adults feed on things rich in sugar, but their larva feed on protein, which the adults find, chew, and condition to feed their young. The young produce a sugar the adults relish. In late summer as larva mature, worker yellow jackets change their food preference from meats to sweets as the young stop producing sweet treats for the adults that feed them.

If you find a yellow jacket nest near your house, it is best to get rid of it so you or anyone else or your pets don’t mistakenly aggravate them and get stung. Because these insects are aggressive and can sting repeatedly, it is best to call a professional to clear the nest away.

Not all bugs are bad. Some, in fact, are essential to our well being on the planet. One of these is the honey bee, which pollinates tens of billions of dollars worth of crops across the US. Without these insects we would have no oranges, almonds, and many of the other fruits, nuts, and vegetables we eat every day, not to mention a lot of flowers that help to beautify our homes and gardens.

Only a few years ago, something ominous started happening. Honey bees would leave their hives to gather pollen and then never return, leaving the other adult bees and queen so starve to death. Bee keepers who would transport their bees around to different orchards to pollinate the trees were finding that a within a relatively short period many of their hives, sometimes up to 70% of them in a single season, were being abandoned. No one knew why.

Some speculated that cell phones or magnetic fields were mucking with the bees’ ability to navigate and that they would get lost trying to make it back to their hives from the flowers. Thanks to molecular biologists and geneticists, we now know that the cause of this devastating crash in the honey bee population is due to a virus.

Scientists found this out by comparing the bee genome (the arrangement of genes in honey bee DNA) of disappearing bee populations with those that were not having the problem. Turns out that the bee populations being compromised were infected with a virus that was first found in bee colonies in Israel in 2002. It is a close, probably mutated, version of the Kashmir bee virus.