Homeowner shocked by 30,000 bee colony living in wall

An elderly woman thought there were wasps in her walls but found a 30,000 bee colony instead.

There was a buzz in Skelmersdale, Lancashire when a homeowner discovered a colony of more than 30,000 bees living in her home. The stripey visitors had taken up residence in the wall of the elderly woman’s house. At first, she thought they were wasps and was worried she was in danger.

The 90-year-old homeowner called the council out to kill them. They passed her on to local expert, Philip ‘Fred’ Adedeji, known locally as Fred the beekeeper. He soon identified the squatters as a bee colony and set about dealing with the problem.

Fred estimated there were more than 30,000 honeybees packed into the cladding of the wall. He explained: “A lot of people confuse honeybees with wasps because they’re smaller.”

The owner had spotted the problem months earlier and thought the insects would just die off. However, they did not go away, and the problem escalated.

Fred had to remove the cladding from the house by standing on a garage roof. He would normally erect scaffolding, but the woman was desperate.

Once Fred located the swarm, he had to remove the cladding from the side of the house to access the bees: “Because of the location I couldn’t access them easily, they’d gone right around into the corner into the cavity – I vacuumed the bees out.”

After removing the bees, he placed the comb in frames and took them back to live in his own hives, as reported by the Liverpool Echo.

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