Bee Swarm
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So relying on the collective wisdom of the Fern here.
About three weeks ago I noticed like a crackling noise coming from the heat pump unit in my bedroom. This was only installed after last summers heatwave so I figured something was wrong.
Noise was getting worse although not constant, but I began to worry about an electrical issue potentially causing a fire. So I switched off the power at the main board but the intermittent "crackle" was still there.
Last night I went to check in case something was rubbing against the house and discovered that there is crack on the underside of one of the weatherboards and there are bees inside the wall cavity.
Any suggestions - 100 year old kauri bungalow so don't really want to start ripping timber off.
Oh and I'm allergic to bee stings
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Fake News!!! Monsanto killed all the bees and humanity is doomed!
You're just a shill for big pesticide!
Surely a bee keeper will come take them away for free?
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So relying on the collective wisdom of the Fern here.
About three weeks ago I noticed like a crackling noise coming from the heat pump unit in my bedroom. This was only installed after last summers heatwave so I figured something was wrong.
Noise was getting worse although not constant, but I began to worry about an electrical issue potentially causing a fire. So I switched off the power at the main board but the intermittent "crackle" was still there.
Last night I went to check in case something was rubbing against the house and discovered that there is crack on the underside of one of the weatherboards and there are bees inside the wall cavity.
Any suggestions - 100 year old kauri bungalow so don't really want to start ripping timber off.
Oh and I'm allergic to bee stings
Nah your fucked, put the house on the market and call it a wild life lovers dream home.
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Are you 100% sure they are bees not wasps? Tunnelling into cracks like that in my experience is usually wasps , thats a bit easier to deal with because you can get an exterminator to kill all of them if like most people you are averse to killing bees.
Here's a handy guide to telling them apart.
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@mariner4life said in Bee Swarm:
Surely a bee keeper will come take them away for free?
We got hold of a beekeeper as we had two swarms on the farm recently. They gladly took them and also gave us a heap of free honey. They just chucked a hive beside the swarm and within a couple of days, all the bees went into the hives
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Are you 100% sure they are bees not wasps? Tunnelling into cracks like that in my experience is usually wasps , thats a bit easier to deal with because you can get an exterminator to kill all of them if like most people you are averse to killing bees.
Here's a handy guide to telling them apart.
Wasps are such fluffybunnies, bees give us another option for our toast other then jam, peanut butter and marmite.
What are wasps good for? -
@mariner4life said in Bee Swarm:
@Hooroo did you end up getting chickens?
from the bee farmer?
Duh. He means when the honey hatched.
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Are you 100% sure they are bees not wasps? Tunnelling into cracks like that in my experience is usually wasps , thats a bit easier to deal with because you can get an exterminator to kill all of them if like most people you are averse to killing bees.
Here's a handy guide to telling them apart.
Wasps are such fluffybunnies, bees give us another option for our toast other then jam, peanut butter and marmite.
What are wasps good for?There used to be a bounty on the little fluffybunnies, the government paid people for every wasp next they destroyed . The little fucks aren't native either , just another "wtf is this thing here?" import like stoats possums and Julie Ann Genter.
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Poor Dogmeat. He's going to log back in, see heaps of replies to his thread, and think someone has solved his problem. Only to find, as usual, we graffitied all over his thread.
Just on wasps, so of the fluffybunnies flying around my house are as big as my fucking finger. Evil dragon-sized motherfuckers.
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@mariner4life said in Bee Swarm:
Poor Dogmeat. He's going to log back in, see heaps of replies to his thread, and think someone has solved his problem. Only to find, as usual, we graffitied all over his thread.
Just on wasps, so of the fluffybunnies flying around my house are as big as my fucking finger. Evil dragon-sized motherfuckers.
[insert annoying pun or comment about "fucking finger" here]
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@mariner4life said in Bee Swarm:
Poor Dogmeat. He's going to log back in, see heaps of replies to his thread, and think someone has solved his problem. Only to find, as usual, we graffitied all over his thread.
Just on wasps, so of the fluffybunnies flying around my house are as big as my fucking finger. Evil dragon-sized motherfuckers.
[insert annoying pun or comment about "fucking finger" here]
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Triggered! I was trying to get some tennis balls we had hit into some bushes in the weekend and got swarmed by skinny looking wasps (hornets). Got stung multiple times. It hurt.
In other news, I can move really fast when motivated. Even over a high wire fence
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@Hooroo did you end up getting chickens?
Nope. That idea was quickly extinguished when true-love said that if a chicken spooks a horse through a fence it will take hundreds of thousands of eggs for that chicken to make up for it.
I agreed as she essentially was saying if a chicken puts a horse through a fence it is on me!
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@mariner4life said in Bee Swarm:
Poor Dogmeat. He's going to log back in, see heaps of replies to his thread, and think someone has solved his problem. Only to find, as usual, we graffitied all over his thread.
Just on wasps, so of the fluffybunnies flying around my house are as big as my fucking finger. Evil dragon-sized motherfuckers.
Quoinsland!
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@Hooroo did you end up getting chickens?
Nope. That idea was quickly extinguished when true-love said that if a chicken spooks a horse through a fence it will take hundreds of thousands of eggs for that chicken to make up for it.
I agreed as she essentially was saying if a chicken puts a horse through a fence it is on me!
Just tell her to train her horses better so they don't get scared by a chook. Stand your ground man.
As for the nest, I used to find that petrol and a match was very effective. You can remove the bees or the house. Either way the problem is removed.
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Thanks for all the really helpful advice....
So yesterday I left the aircon going full bore on its coldest setting thinking that if I make it uncomfortable for the little buggers they might just fuck off.
Got home to a massive increase in volume and about two dozen dead bees (definitely not wasps) Somehow the cunning little fuckers have worked out how to crawl through the aircon unit.
Grateful though I am for all your input - no I haven't seen Snowy, but I expect he will appear on out TV screens soon - I have done some other online research and it appears I am fucked.
Beekeepers are keen to collect swarms but not when they have nestled in a wall cavity.
Exterminators are the only option but they favour the rip the wall off to get at the little fuckers approach.
I'm going away for a few days so might try and cool them down again.
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@dogmeat back to the nuke from orbit option bro. Stink news about the update though, hope you manage to sort it without too much hassle. No doubt paying someone to clear them out will sting a bit
I reckon you should give @Kirwan a hollah, if he can duck, dodge and ummm, duck some Wasps he should be all good to take out some bees for ya.
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Thanks for all the really helpful advice....
So yesterday I left the aircon going full bore on its coldest setting thinking that if I make it uncomfortable for the little buggers they might just fuck off.
Got home to a massive increase in volume and about two dozen dead bees (definitely not wasps) Somehow the cunning little fuckers have worked out how to crawl through the aircon unit.
Grateful though I am for all your input - no I haven't seen Snowy, but I expect he will appear on out TV screens soon - I have done some other online research and it appears I am fucked.
Beekeepers are keen to collect swarms but not when they have nestled in a wall cavity.
@Paekakboyz hell no.
Why won't they take them, out of interest? Does that leave you with having to exterminate them?
I got birds stuck nesting in my passive air system in the roof, that was carnage cleaning that up. The guy that had to get up there and clear out the dead birds was stuggling not to vomit for most of it. Ended up replacing a lot of it too.
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@Kirwan beeswarm.co.nz says that once they get inside a cavity they are no longer swarming but are effectively a hive
They have a link to a recommended exterminator which they say is probably the only practical option. I have made contact.
I do have a lot of bees at my place as I have flowering trees most of the year
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@Kirwan wuss!!
But yeah nah, I started watching my Dad and our neighbour kill off a MASSIVE wasp nest down the back of the neighbours section about 25 years ago (fark me!!). I swear it was about 2m long and nearly 1m wide - my brother and I were keen to watch then noped the fuck out once shit got real.
ha ha our neighbour would have gotten along with @jegga really well I reckon. Lots of gasoline and whoosh!! oh, and heaps of running away too!
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@Kirwan beeswarm.co.nz says that once they get inside a cavity they are no longer swarming but are effectively a hive
They have a link to a recommended exterminator which they say is probably the only practical option. I have made contact.
I do have a lot of bees at my place as I have flowering trees most of the year
I know this is a silly question, why not just leave them there? You (someone with experience)could collect the honey once a year
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@Kirwan beeswarm.co.nz says that once they get inside a cavity they are no longer swarming but are effectively a hive
They have a link to a recommended exterminator which they say is probably the only practical option. I have made contact.
I do have a lot of bees at my place as I have flowering trees most of the year
I know this is a silly question, why not just leave them there? You (someone with experience)could collect the honey once a year
They tend to damage buildings they make their hive in and I guess access to the comb is next to impossible inside a wall .
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They are getting in underneath a weatherboard through a gap of about 7mm. Try getting honey out through that. I reckon the board eased off when the aircon was installed.
Plus you can hear them all the time moving around - like a crackling noise. Now they've started getting inside the room so they are clearly in the guts of the aircon. So noise and potential damage as jegga says with absolutely no upside.
If it is possible to remove them without killing them that would be my preference for sure but they are becoming very intrusive
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They are getting in underneath a weatherboard through a gap of about 7mm. Try getting honey out through that. I reckon the board eased off when the aircon was installed.
Plus you can hear them all the time moving around - like a crackling noise. Now they've started getting inside the room so they are clearly in the guts of the aircon. So noise and potential damage as jegga says with absolutely no upside.
If it is possible to remove them without killing them that would be my preference for sure but they are becoming very intrusive
Completely understand!
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You could just leave them . If left untreated , verroa mites will kill the swarm in a short period of time .
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Only slightly related to this thread, when I was a kid I was sick one school night so my Mum let me stay with her in the lounge rather than lie in bed by myself. She was watching a drama (it was kind of Little House on the Prairie style era but not that show) where one of the characters got killed by a bee swarm. That, was the scariest thing I'd ever seen in my life - it haunted me for years, way more than seeing Omen when I was waaaaay to young to be watching it. Oddly, it never translated to me being afraid of bees in real life, just the memory of that when I was trying to go to sleep.
Well, that was a good therapy session.
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@Nepia you should avoid watching My Girl then!
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@Paekakboyz said in Bee Swarm:
@Nepia you should avoid watching My Girl then!
Hahaha, I saw that and it didn't bother me too much, must be due to Culkin's punchable face.
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Anyone else been caught in a bee swarm? It's happened to me twice which from I understand is pretty rare. First one I was a young kid flying a kite with my old man on a rugby field and this swarm came through, he just told me it was really important that we just stay calm close our eyes and mouth and wait for it to pass very strange experience hearing thousands of bees flying around you. The second was at my grandparents when I was early teens, I managed to get inside for that to watch the whole thing thousands of bees, banging into the windows, freaky stuff. Thank Christ those fuckers are dying off eh!
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@Rembrandt aren't you meant to lay down or something. Was it an NZ ODI or test match overseas when a swarm crossed the field? You did well to stay still, that'd be terrifying!
