San Diego Bees

San Diego Bees remove honeybee swarms and established colonies safely, ALIVE, from trees, walls, chimneys and roofs.

Before you call an exterminator consider how important honeybees are for pollinating our food and consider the crisis which bees are currently.

If in doubt just call us for information, a regular swarm removal is from $155.
(619) 886-6782

If the swarm has flown away when we arrive, there will just be a call-out fee of $25 to cover expenses.

Removal of established colonies is usually more expensive, depending on the situation. Phone estimates are free.

People sometimes call and ask whether a swarm of bees in a tree will leave of their own accord?

The answer is, yes they almost certainly will!

The problem is that while a swarm is hanging from a tree branch or sitting on your fence, scouts are checking out sites for a more permanent home.

The scouts look for a nice warm dry cavity which is to their liking. They will check out anywhere they can find which includes any cavity in your house walls, roof, chimney, hot-tub or under your garden shed or deck. They only need a hole 3/8" in diameter.

Once they have found a place they like, the whole swarm will take to the wing and populate their new home.

Removing a swarm from a tree branch is infinitely easier than from inside the roof of your house. If left to their own devices a colony will build combs and might store 100lbs of honey.

If anything happens to the bee colony and the honey is left unattended, the wax can soften and leak honey which absorbs water and soon starts to ferment.

Imagine what it would be like to have 100lbs or more of fermenting honey dripping through your ceiling, and how costly the clean-up might be.

There may not be any honey in the combs, but as Dirty harry said, "Do you feel luck?"

If combs and bees are accessible in a roof space, nest or storage cabinet removal is reasonably straightforward.

Removing bees from places where they are inaccessible can be quite a challenge. The longer they have been there, the more reluctant they are to leave and the more difficult the task becomes.

One method which I have found successful is the cone method. The bee's entrance is blocked and a cone made from metal screen is placed over the entrance. This allows the bees to exit, but not return. A hive containing a small colony is placed nearby.

During the day the bees fly out through the cone and go about their normal business. When they try to return, they are not able negotiate the cone and so collect outside. When the sun sets and the temperature drops, they go into the hive box.

Usually some of the bees in the box act as guard bees to keep out interlopers. It seems that because the resident colony is quite small, and the entering bees have pollen and nectar, they are allowed in without fighting.

Over the course of a few weeks almost all the bees inside the structure are transferred to the hive box. A few, including the queen are left behind. These eventually die out.

This method is particularly successful if the colony has been in its new location for only a short time since they will not have had time to build come in which the queen can lay eggs.

Once it's clear that no more bees are going to come out, the screen cone is removed and the bees from the hive box are allowed to go inside. Any honey which remains inside is robbed out and moved into the hive box.

The most difficult part of this method is stopping the bees finding an alternative entrance back into their hive. If the colony has taken up residence in a wall with many cracks, it is extremely difficult to exclude the bees.

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