Honeybees invaded my house, and no one would help
Sarah Kliff
I noticed the first bee one afternoon as my dog gleefully chased it around the house. When the pest settled on a window by the stairwell, I swatted it with a cookbook and cleaned up the mess.
Five minutes later, another bee buzzed at the same window. Then a third in my kids’ room. When I heard a loud droning coming from inside a wall next to my son’s bed, the ominous situation finally hit me: The house was infested.
This was early April, the start of “swarm season,” when honeybee colonies search for places to build new hives. A small gap in the roof gave them access to our attic and put us on the honeybee real estate market.
But in those first frantic hours, as I darted from room to room slamming the book on them, we thought the insects might be wasps. My husband called an exterminator, who agreed to come the next morning. Then a bee-loving friend who saw a photo told us they were honeybees. When we updated the exterminator, he canceled the appointment.
Once honeybees move in, it turns out, they are particularly difficult to evict.
Over the past two decades, fears of a collapsing honeybee population have inspired elegiac journalism and 30 state laws aiming to protect pollinators. Three states have given special tax breaks to beekeepers, and others have devoted millions to studying the disappearing colonies. In Washington, where I live, the DC Beekeepers Alliance notes that it is “illegal for pest control contractors to spray honeybees.”
As evening approached and a gray cloud of bees grew steadily
outside our roof ’s crack, we headed to a hotel, kids and energetic dog in tow. My 2-year-old danced around pretending to be a bee, her hands pointed into a stinger. My 5-year-old asked why the bees had chosen our house. Great question, bud.
My husband and I stared at our phones on the crisp hotel sheets, panic-searching online for answers. Honeybees are one of two species — the other is humans — that can communicate directions to a new place without directly leading others there. And they engage in an elaborate, democratic process to choose new homes. They prefer to build hives in tight spaces about the size of a large backpack, often within crawl spaces, walls and attics. Once established in a comfy spot, they can stay there indefinitely, building hives and producing honey.
We sent a few panicked messages to local WhatsApp groups, read blog posts about citronella deterrents and found a “bee repellent” Spotify track that sounded like a never-ending beep. We commanded the Alexa speaker back in our kids’ room to play the noise on loop all night.
The next morning, we returned to the infestation and started working the phones, to much disappointment. “When we identify a honeybee issue, we try to have a local beekeeper assist,” Ben Hottel, an entomologist and spokesperson for Orkin, a pest control company, later told me.
One exterminator finally agreed to come by, only to dash our hopes upon arrival. He wouldn’t touch the bees but said that he knew a contractor who would commit illicit bee murder. We declined.
I considered buying a can of Raid, but I felt too guilty. I had a vague sense that honeybees needed saving, and some of my neighbors felt strongly about the issue. “They are so important to our ecosystem,” one neighbor advised on WhatsApp. “Their number is dwindling.” She suggested we call a beekeeper.
So we tried the swarm squad, a volunteer group of beekeepers who will collect wayward colonies. Unfortunately, the squad generally only deals with outdoor hives. A representative recommended a dozen other beekeepers with indoor expertise.
Every one of them told me the same thing: Our problem was too small.
When a colony is looking for a new home, it sends out a few hundred “scouts” to find options, each visiting 10 to 20 possible locations. When a scout likes a place, it returns to the hive and performs a “waggle” dance that tells its brethren exactly how far and in what direction they need to travel to find the potential home. The more vigorous the dance, the more a scout likes the location. Eventually, the thousands of hive dwellers vote on which place they like best.
Apparently, scouts were sizing up our home. To us, they were plenty alarming on their own. But the beekeepers reassured us that they were unlikely to sting; they didn’t have a hive or queen to defend. Call us back, they said, when you see a few thousand bees.
There was little else to do but wait and see if the colony would choose us. I repacked our suitcase for another night away. Maybe this was my family’s small contribution to saving an imperiled species, I thought.
What I wish I had known then: Honeybees do not need saving.
In March, new federal data showed that the number of honeybee colonies has increased by 31% since 2007. A vast majority of those insects are used in commercial farming, carted from state to state to pollinate crops.
“Honeybees are not endangered nor at risk of extinction,” noted a 2023 report from the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.
“The fact that honeybees are domesticated and managed negates the possibility of being endangered.”
Honeybees are an invasive species that were brought to the United States from Europe. Saving one of their colonies can actually hurt native bees, many of which are endangered. A recent study in Montreal found that when the number of honeybee hives rose in part of the city, the number of native bees declined.
“You are not helping a wild species” when you save a honeybee swarm, said Rich Hatfield, a senior conservation biologist at Xerces. “You are introducing 10,000 to 50,000 mouths to feed to an environment that may not have enough resources.”
The bees in my house were looking for resources. Left on our own, we cobbled together a plan to make our real estate seem as unappealing as possible. We tried to sequester as many of the honeybees as possible in the attic. It was better if they didn’t leave, the beekeepers had said, so they couldn’t go waggle to their friends. They gravitate toward light, so we flipped on a lightbulb and watched a dozen immediately swarm around it.
Two beekeepers gave us their blessing to kill the honeybees that had already made it into our house, suggesting a vacuum method. Within minutes, honeybees filled our Dyson.
Bees are most active in the warm temperatures of late afternoon. We anxiously waited for a swarm to descend. Around 4 p.m. we went outside and stared at the sky, just as we had a few days earlier for the solar eclipse.
The swarm never showed. By evening, fewer bees were roaming around the house, and the attic buzzing had grown softer. We slept at home with the Dyson near the bed.
The next morning, my son discovered dead bees in his playroom, and the dog ate some carcasses on the floor. Thirty-six hours after the honeybees had arrived, they were gone.
Stunned by the bizarre experience, I called Thomas Seeley, a professor at Cornell who has studied honeybee behavior for more than 40 years.
Ours had been a close call, Seeley said. The fact that a scout bee’s shimmy had convinced scores of others to check out our house meant that we were “clearly on the list of serious possibilities,” he said.
I peppered him with mitigation questions. Should we have tried citronella candles? No, they actually like that smell, he said, but moth balls could have helped. And what about the beeping Spotify track — did that help steer them away? Bees can’t hear, he said.
I searched for honeybee-related posts on my neighborhood email listserv, where people regularly write in looking for exterminators. “Don’t worry folks, I’m probees!” read one message from a neighbor with a swarm last spring.
I noticed a new post, dated one week after the bees had left us. Bees had taken root on the poster’s deck, she said, attaching a photo of a dense yellow swarm. Perhaps, I thought, our scouts had found their new home.
“Called 311 and they weren’t super interested,” she wrote. “Any ideas? We’d like to save these bees.”