Couple in Florida discovers 80,000 bees inside bathroom wall

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A couple from Florida, United States, recently said goodbye to some uninvited guests: a colony of up to 80,000 bees that invaded the shower wall of their home.

The size of the colony astonished even Elisha Bixler, a professional beekeeper whom the couple — Stefanie and Dan Graham from St. Petersburg, Florida — called in to solve the problem for them.

“There was honey everywhere: on the walls, on the floor, on my shoes, on the door handles,” said Bixler, interviewed on Wednesday (15). “We had to tear off the entire wall covering to remove the entire comb.”

She estimated there were about 80,000 bees and 45 kg of honey when she removed the 2.1 meter high hive in early November after tearing down the bathroom tiles. The discovery was first reported on Tampa Bay TV channel FOX 13.

Bixler, 28, owns the apiary How’s Your Day Honey. She said that she had to cover everything with plastic sheeting to try to contain the goo.

Aware that something out of the ordinary was going on, the Grahams approached Bixlers in October. It was not the first contact the family had had with bees in their beach house, which is made of wood, has three floors and is supported on stilts.

Two to three years ago, Stefanie Graham said on Wednesday, her husband ripped the tiles off the wall in the same bathroom and took out a gigantic hive that was there. Since then, they had been working on the roof. Graham said the works left some openings, which ended up serving as a gateway for the bees to return.

The couple, who have two children and two Great Dane dogs, learned to live with their “guests”, even though they were bitten a few times.

“We both love nature and we love bees,” Stefanie said. “We thought, ‘We’ll leave you alone, and you leave us alone too.’ They were nice bees. So we said, ‘Okay, you can live in our bathroom.'”

But the cohabitation had to end when the family decided to renovate the bathroom, said Stefanie, who is 41 and is a high school English teacher and part-time real estate agent.

Bixler said she is more used to removing beehives from roofs, sheds or trees.

“It was the first time I took a hive out of a bathroom,” she said.

When she arrived at the couple’s house on November 2, she took out her thermal detector, which measures heat, and pointed it at the shower wall. The device indicated that the temperature was at 35 degrees centigrade, typical for a beehive.

“As soon as I saw where the bees were, I started pulling out the tiles, and a huge beehive over six feet tall appeared. It was mostly honey,” she said.

Bixler advised the couple to keep their distance while she removed the bees, a process that took her more than five hours and cost $800 (about R$4,500), an amount not covered by the Grahams’ insurance.

But, Bixler said, Stephanie “went into the bathroom when the job was about halfway through, to take a look.”

Stephanie said her family was not afraid. “But I know a lot of people who would have been scared,” he commented.

Bixler, who has been a professional beekeeper for three years, said she initially wore only a veil to protect herself from bees. But after receiving several bites, he wore a protective suit that included gloves and boots.

Searching the bees, she eventually located the queen bee, whose abdomen was twice the size of the common bee. She placed the queen in a protective cage and placed the cage inside a box with the other bees.

“This takes all the bees to go into the box to be with the queen,” said the beekeeper. “The queen wants to go back to that wall. She thinks that place is her home.”

Bixler used a special vacuum to extract some stray bees from the hive.

Robert Page Jr., professor emeritus of entomology at the University of California at Davis, said Wednesday that odors from the previous bee colony must have attracted the young bees to the shower wall.

Book author “The Art of the Bee: Shaping the Environment from Landscapes to Societies(The art of the bee: shaping the environment, from landscapes to societies), Page said waiting before calling a professional to remove bees from a colony has serious drawbacks. He said bees can damage laminated plaster walls and that honey can ferment, causing odors that can attract ants.

“We like honey bees, but not when they’re on the wall at home,” said the professor.

Bixler saved much of the honey and said he used it to feed the bees he rescued and keeps on his small farm in St. Petersburg. The Grahams kept some for themselves.

“I told them they had the option of simply chewing the comb. Or they could pass the honey through a sieve,” said the beekeeper.

She said that she usually takes care of the bees she rescues, until they regain their normal health, and then redistributes them among other apiaries.

Stephanie Graham said she has read many historical accounts of people talking to bees about important facts in their lives, in a ritual known as “reporting to the bees.” He said that she too began talking to the bees and that she did so when her “guests” left.

“I said goodbye to the bees. I told them they were going to get a new home.”

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