I heard a very interesting presentation tonight at the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers meeting. The talk was on honeybee removal and was given by Cindy Bee. She does a cut-out a day from April - October. She had fantastic pictures of cut-outs in walls, floors, church steeples, columns on houses, etc.
I know a lot of you do cut-outs. When Cindy does it, she fills the space from which she cleared out the bees with insulation. She said that this allows her to tell the owner that the bees will not return to that spot because the bees don't like to chew through insulation.
I wondered if those of you who do cut-outs also follow that practice.
When Cindy does a cut-out, she cleans the space and then replaces the dry-wall or whatever she had to remove to get to the bees and leaves the space ready for sanding, mud, and paint, but the holes are covered by her so that she can put in the insulation. She showed a great slide or two about how she uses 2 X 4s to anchor the drywall to when she replaces it.
Do others use insulation like that?
Linda T curious in Atlanta
I do not. It is not a bad idea. In fact it is a good one. I just would have to by huge rolls of it. I tell the owners to fill it in. remember I am doing this for free. Also compost bins, horse stables, and water meters are not real practical for insulation.
I always seem to be the exception not the rule. But maybe that cutout in the rain barrel could use it.
Sincerely,
Brendhan
I have done cutouts where I pulled the sheathing off the wall and the bees had removed all the insulation just leaving the vapor barrier.......I don't think insulation is a deterant. I tell the building owners to put moth balls in the cavity before they seal it up and block all the entrances. I guess in the south the bees will not chew insulation when there are plenty of other empty wall cavities, but when every cavity has insulation the will remove it. I also tell the building owner that my job is to remove the bees for them....they have to take steps to fix the damage and prevent more bees from moving back in.
One of the issues in cut outs is local laws. Some places, if you charge, and you should, you have to have a contractors license to repair the wall. It's usually simplest to remove the bees and let a professional carpenter take care of rebuilding it. I always advise them that the cavity needs to be filled and all holes plugged or bees will most likely move in again in the future.
bluegrass, you may be right, but in Georgia the bees have lots of space from which to choose with no insulation. In the South, very few exterior walls have insulation in them, according to Cindy. So when she puts insulation in a hole from which she has removed bees, a returning bee colony would have many other places in the wall from which to choose.
The cavities she has found bees in were fascinating. I learned a lot about construction - for example, to do firewalls in apartment complexes the cavity between apartment floor/ceilings can be so large that she sometimes has to put her whole body into the whole to reach the top.
Cindy is a full time bee removal person (and charges for it). There are other really good beekeepers in Georgia like Bill Owens for whom bee removal is a business for them.
Linda T in Atlanta
I fill the cavity with expandable foam, at least where the access point is, and if its in a wall, I like to fill the top layer down a couple of feet, same for a ceiling. Nothing is permanent but my intention is to keep swarms away after the removal. If you do no be-proofing, you can count on other bees returning and taking up residency. Sometimes the next day or that week. If it's a removal that requires extensive repairs to put back, It is up to the customer to hire someone for the repairs. Moth balls and no pest strips are good for keeping bees out of the removal area for a while, until they lose their residual effect.