A honey bee infestation can be a terrifying experience, especially if someone in the household is allergic to them. While you may be tempted to find ways to kill these critters, you need to consider the help they provide to the economy and the environment. A better alternative to eliminating the honey bees is relocating them to a place where their services are needed. Let’s look at the facts…
Honey Bees Help the Economy
According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, over $15 billion worth of crops in America are pollinated by bees every year. These crops include apples, cucumbers, alfalfa, almonds, and cantaloupes. By killing off the bee population, you reduce the ability for farmers to grow their crops naturally, forcing them to increase production costs. That will inevitably raise the prices on the products you need.
Honey bees also produce about $150 million worth of honey each year, but their populations continue to decline. If you choose to relocate your bees instead of killing them, you can provide significant help for the agricultural community.
How Honey Bees Help the Environment
Honey bees provide a natural way for plants to spread their seeds. As the bees collect pollen from flowers, they unintentionally pick up seeds from the flower too. Then when they land somewhere else, the seeds fall off and the flower is able to grow. This happens with a lot of plants bees encounter, and it ensures that nature is well balanced in its flora. Do you really want to interrupt that process by killing off a colony?
How Honey Bee Relocation Services Work
If you decide to have your honeybees relocated, a professional exterminator will come out to assess the size of the colony. You may think a hive is much smaller than it actually is because bees like to burrow their way into trees and home sidings. Many members of the bee population stay close to the queen inside the hive, only coming out when there is a threat to their home or queen. You probably have no idea just how many bees you have around you.
After the initial assessment, the pest control specialist will come up with a plan for removal. This may involve cutting off part of your home’s siding to gain access to the bees. For most hives, an exterminator will spray smoke to calm and confuse the bees. This makes them easy to capture and it reduces the chances of stinging.
The pest control expert will have a new hive of some sort set up for the bees to go into. He will often use a modified vacuum to suck up the bees and put them into this new hive. The bees are not fully contained in the hive. They can still come and go if they please. If he is able to get the queen in there though, they will follow her wherever she goes.
The exterminator will get as many bees as possible into the bee box and then tear out any remaining elements of the old hive. He may spray something over the top of it to mask the smell for other bees passing by. Then the exterminator will seal up the old hive to prevent bees from getting back in. any bees that were not in the hive during the time of removal will fly away to find their queen.
If you notice a problem in the future, you simply need to contact pest control to have the bees removed again. The sooner you alert someone about the issue, the easier it will be to relocate your bees.
