Bees are among the most industrious insects on Earth. We should be thankful for these hard-working pollinators, because without them, so many crops that we depend on would basically fail entirely. But, as necessary as they are, bees can also be big pests, particularly when they decide to set up a thriving hive inside the cozy walls of our home!
No matter how much you like and care about the bees, you can’t let things go on. It increases the odds of people and pets getting stung and the accumulated honey will attract a host of other pests. Note that bees won’t cause structural damage to the walls (like termites or carpenter bees would)…
They’ve got to go, and to help you get rid of them I’ll tell you about the ways to get them out of your walls, and you might not even need to hurt them. Grab your bee suit for safety and let’s get going…
How Can You Tell Bees Are in Your Walls?
It’s pretty easy to tell if you’ve got bees inside your walls. If you notice a lot of bees coming and going from the same side of your house when you’re outside, start paying close attention.
If you see them entering and exiting a specific point, it is all but certain they’ve already established a hive in there.
If you’re still unsure, make your house quiet and then listen carefully in every room and in every closet. Listen for a droning buzz that is continuous; that’s them!
You can also look for soft and spongy drywalls, or mysterious stains appearing on walls or ceilings – probably due to wax staining according to NC State Extension, which states:
Honey can continue to ferment and lead to discoloration and damage of walls
Honey Bee Removal From Residential & Commercial Sites
Both are reliable indicators of bee infestation! Now try the following to get rid of them…
The Trouble With Leaving the Wax Inside the Wall
As alluded to above, the honey and wax that the bees store inside your wall is a magnet for insects and rodents. Some of these methods will take care of the bees and save you the trouble of breaking open the wall to get to the wax.
But what happens after that? Obviously, the comb will still be there and continue to attract other pests. And you probably know that honey has an indefinite shelf life.
So before you choose which methods you want to try, give this some serious thought.
Here’s What Works
✅ Sealing Up Your Home
The very best way to get bees out of your walls is to keep them from setting up shop in your walls in the first place. I mean to say you should make it a point to seal up your home by no later than early spring.
Go around your house on the outside and look for any crack, any crevice, any slipped joint, whole or opening that could allow bees to access the interior spaces of your home.
This could be cracks in masonry, dislodged, siding, loose soffits, split shingles, sagging trim, missing flashing- anything that could allow bees to enter a space that is warm, dry, and protected from predators.
That’s all they’re looking for when they are nesting. So, grab yourself a caulking gun with some all-weather caulk, expanding gap-filling foam, weatherproof tape, hardware cloth, and whatever else you need to tidy up and tune up your place.
Stop at nothing, and pay special attention to chimneys and openings around vent and pipe stacks. A bee can wriggle through a tiny opening, so be diligent and do a thorough job. If you do this right, you won’t need any of the other techniques on this list!
✅ Calling a Beekeeper
Take it from me, sometimes discretion is the better part of valor. This is a job that’s often best left to the pros… Not only do you want to avoid damaging your home, but it would be best if you would avoid pissing off a hive swarming with bees that will then pour out in retaliation to sting the daylights out of you.
Sure, it sounds funny, but once you start getting a few stings, or more, you’re dealing with a medically significant event.
So naturally, you should call a beekeeper. A beekeeper, not an exterminator. They will have the tools, training, and know-how to easily locate the bees and probably remove them from your home with a minimum of damage.
Even better, they’ll be more than happy to rehome the hive on their own farm, giving the bees another chance at life and allowing them to go about their important work in the ecosystem.
Best of all, most beekeepers can sometimes provide this service free of charge or for a greatly reduced cost because they can snag a mature and thriving hive basically for free – but only if the hive is easy to remove. Typically, though, the service can cost anywhere between $500 and $1,500 depending on location and difficulty.
What they typically do is they use thermal vision to find the right the hive, then cut your wall in a few places, then use a low-suction vacuum to collect all of the bees out alive. Lastly, they will remove the whole wax comb along with the honey.
This means you’ll have to fix your wall afterwards, but you’ll know for sure that the swarm is gone for good.
✅ The Trap-Out Method
This one is really clever. It works by setting up a one-way cone over the hive’s entry point. As the bees try to leave the hive, they get trapped in the cone with no way of going back. One by one, the bees will accumulate inside the cone.
This method suffers from the issues I mentioned or will mention: the queen and possibly some of the other bees will not fall for the trap because they never leave the hive. In fact, the bee can survive without extra food for up to a few months.
The other issue is, the comb will still be left inside the wall. On the bright side, your wall will remain intact, so if you want to take a chance with other pests being attracted to the sweetness of the honey, that’s for you to decide.
✅ Using A Bee Vacuum
if you want to vacuum the bees on out your own, and you’re sure you can protect yourself from stings, then know that you can’t use a vacuum or even a shop vac. A bee vacuum has the low suction required to collect them alive and it won’t annoy them enough to sting you.
If you’re going to do this, you should definitely wear a bee suit. And again, the wax comb will be left inside, so there’s that!
✅ Applying Pesticides
If you really just want the bees gone and don’t care about the consequences for the ecosystem you can resort to pesticides to kill them directly, quickly, and certainly.
There are countless kinds of pesticides on the market, once again including those that are bee-specific. You can use liquids, powders, aerosols, foggers, and a lot more to get the job done, or a combination of all of them.
However, you want to be very cautious if you’re doing this yourself because you will necessarily have to get close enough to the hive entrance for the bees to register you as a threat.
Also, consider that you are pumping this stuff into your walls, and depending on where the hive is situated, you may or may not be able to reach it directly.
Instead, you’ll only begin to kill off bees that cross the area where the poison was applied when coming and going. This will usually necessitate several applications over time for a complete kill.
But if you’re lucky, it might be possible to deploy a fogger inside the hive entrance that will completely permeate the hive and kill the queen, young and all.
As I mentioned in the repellent application above, this is something you’ll want to do at night and as quickly and cautiously as you can while the bees are all inside resting.
Try this during the daytime at your own peril! If you’re going to go that route, I would recommend a full bee suit.
✅ Calling the Exterminator
As I alluded to above regarding calling a beekeeper, some jobs are truly better left to the professionals. If you don’t care about saving and relocating the bees, an exterminator will definitely know the best approach for eliminating that hive in your walls. They will also use thermal imaging to know exactly where to cut into the wall to minimize the damage.
Unlike a beekeeper, he’ll typically be able to do it in a minimally invasive way, i.e. they won’t have to cut off a huge section of your drywall or cladding to get at the hive.
An exterminator might use several methods to depopulate the hive, such as deliberately aggravating them so they deploy in defense only to get sucked into a bee vacuum (this is typically low-suction), then apply of heavy-duty pesticides in strategic places that will kill the bees dead, dead, dead.
I’ve seen several surgically take out a hive in a wall by drilling tiny holes from inside the home that could route poison directly into the hive itself with maximum effect. Special nozzles and covers prevent bees from flying back out through the holes while the poison does its deadly work.
It would be better if the bees didn’t have to die… but the safety of you and your family should come first. If you know the problem is already out of control and you don’t have time to mess with a beekeeper, don’t hesitate to call an exterminator.
What Barely Works
❓ Using Repellents
Believe it or not, it is possible to use all-natural or commercially available be repellents to potentially drive bees away from their hiding place inside your walls.
There are lots of things that bees despise, including herbs like basil and rosemary, along with spices like cinnamon, vegetables like cucumbers, and even some oddball things like baby powder.
Whether you’re using something like an essential oil, or a commercially available bee repellent, you want to scatter it all around the entrance that they use to get into your home and back to their hive.
If possible, try to get some directly inside the hole, but you want to do this at night and do so carefully so you don’t get stung.
With a little luck, it will agitate the bees enough that they give up and vacate. But, for a large and thriving hive, it’s unlikely to completely displace them. If you do see results, another thing you can do is plant some of these herbs in containers around the house. Hopefully the smell will discourage any scouting colonies from settling in.
❓ Placing Bee Traps
If you’re done messing around trying to vacate the bees or to relocate them without harming them, and your attempts haven’t met with any success, it is time to go lethal.
There are all sorts of insect traps on the market, including ones that are bee specific, and many more that you can make yourself.
Most of these work by attracting the forager bees with colors and fragrances that they associate with food, and then once they enter the trap, they’re either killed by poison or water, or else they can’t get back out again, and then they subsequently starve.
This is one way to get rid of bees without spraying indiscriminate poisons around, but they take time because you must fully depopulate the hive for it to collapse.
If you already have a large and thriving hive in your walls, you’ll need quite a few of these set up along their route and you’ll need to give them time to work. One by one, the worker bees will fall into the traps. Slowly, but surely, the hive will begin to lose its population until the colony might collapse if the queen does not flee.
I say “might” because there is no guarantee that the remaining ones will leave. I would say it’s a matter of luck – but you can still go ahead and try it!
What Doesn’t Work
❌ Smoking Them Out
If a repellent isn’t working, some folks consider smoking out the bees with a bee smoker, or an improvised solution like a portable fire pit or wood smoker.
As you probably know, beekeepers use smoke to keep their bees calm, but prolonged exposure to smoke will become an irritant to them because it will disrupt the pheromone signals that the hive uses to maintain order.
A longer smoke session might get the bees to give up their hive and leave temporarily, but rest assure the’ll be back after a while, when the smoke has cleared (pun intended!)
The obvious drawback is that this is a method is nothing short of a fire hazard, not to mention it takes a long time. And the longer you smoke your walls, the higher the risk.
❌ Ultrasonic Deterrents
A controversial method of getting rid of bees, some folks swear by them, while others decry them as a total scam. All I know is that there are a few folks out there who swear up and down these things are legit, the bee’s knees you might say. Sorry, couldn’t help myself.
In theory, these make sense until you dig deeper. Bees are mostly sensitive to substrate vibrations, with airborne vibrations sensitivity low. In plain English, a bee will feel vibrations through a solid surface like a wall, but can only detect the airborne vibrations that are in their immediate vicinity.
While they don’t have actual ears, bees have the so-called Johnston’s organ, which can sense vibrations like wind direction and other insects but only if they’re only a few inches close. As such, an ultrasonic deterrent will very likely go unnoticed.
Even if they had the range, their antennae are tuned to frequencies between 200 and 1,000 Hz, while commercial ultrasonic deterrents are in the 20,000 to 65,000 Hz range. This is why you won’t find any that are bee-specific on Amazon…
Add to this the fact that there’s a wall standing between them and the ultrasonic device. What I’m trying to say is, you’ll have more luck disturbing them by banging on the drywall with a hammer. 🙂
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Tom has lived and worked on farms and homesteads from the Carolinas to Kentucky and beyond. He is passionate about helping people prepare for tough times by embracing lifestyles of self-sufficiency.