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Temecula man discovers bee invasion inside walls of his home
By: JOHN HALL - Staff Writer | ∞
A legion of bees invaded the Temecula home of Denny Mighell, but several visits from an exterminator seems to have taken care of the problem.
DAVID CARLSON Staff Photographer
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TEMECULA -- It sounded like it was raining inside the walls of his house, but Denny Mighell knew that was impossible in the heat of July.
What he heard was actually thousands of bees which had made his two-story Temecula house their home.
"It was like the house was swarmed," Mighell said while standing outside his home Tuesday.
Just the day before it was so bad that he and his wife, Maryann, were literally trapped inside their home for several hours, he said.
She is allergic to bee stings so they ultimately had to get her prescription filled in case she was stung, Mighell said.
One of the places the bees had accumulated was above the first-floor bedroom where the couple's two young granddaughters sleep when they visit. The bees were buzzing in the small area between the first-floor ceiling and the floor of the second floor, Mighell said.
The bees "were bouncing around in the walls, going crazy in there," he said. "It sounded like raindrops the way they were hitting the wall and ceiling."
Mighell discovered that he had been invaded a few days ago and it turns out the bees had been living inside his home for some time, unbeknownst to the Mighells.
Mitch Denny, the exterminator Mighell called, determined the winged ones had made their way in through a small vent in a bathroom protruding from one side of the house. The vent has a metal screen with very small holes, but the bees were still able to get in.
"They can flatten their bodies" and get through very small openings, Denny, of Denny Pest Control ,said.
Denny said he is getting more calls this year compared to last from people who discover they have a bee problem, with a few calls a week now where he'd get maybe a couple a month in 2006.
"It seems to be a worse problem than usual this year," he said. "I'm still trying to figure out why."
When he gets to the bee scene, Denny says he's finding some pretty big hives.
"The bees seem to be establishing bigger hives real quickly in homes," Denny said, adding that he is finding an average of 2,000 to 5,000 bees at each hive.
Bob Garcia, owner of Private Pest Exterminators, said he pulled out a 60-pound hive from a Temecula home recently.
It was in a wall void of the home and the bees had made their way in through an eave of the second story of the house, Garcia said.
"The owner saw a few of the bees, but didn't think it was a problem," Garcia said, until the honey started to melt in the heat and stain the stucco on the side of the house.
Bee season starts about March and April, as flowers begin to bloom, he said, and extends through the summer.
Garcia said that, even though experts have determined there is a national shortage of bees and no one really knows why, there is still a strong bee presence in Southwest County.
He's averaging four or five calls a week. "It hasn't slowed down this year," Garcia said.
Most of the bees Garcia says he has come in contact with locally are European bees, which he says are very docile compared to the more famous Africanized honey bees that hit the United States several years ago. He said those are much more aggressive and have cross bred with the European bees as well.
The calls he gets aren't always for established colonies found in houses. "I get a lot of calls for swarms," he said.
If a swarm is in an area that doesn't create a safety issue for anyone, Garcia says he'll usually advise people to stay away and let the bees be.
"They'll usually just hang on to a tree for a day or so, resting, then move on," he said. "It is always much better if we can repel or relocate the bees if at all possible" rather than kill them, Garcia said.
If you get rid of all the bees, he said, that can lead to serious environmental problems.
"They are the main pollinators of fruit trees, for example," Garcia said.
-- Contact staff writer John Hall at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2628, or jhall@californian.com.
Experts give the following advice regarding bees:
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WHAT??!! wrote on Jul 11, 2007 8:37 AM:THIS is news??? I had bees in the walls once, but I didn't call the paper. I know it's quite common. NCT is getting desperate here! Surely there must be illegal alien news...
Uh huh wrote on Jul 11, 2007 9:10 AM:Hey WHAT??!!, this IS about illegal aliens! The bees were EUROPEAN! They crossed into the US without papers! I say deport them! I'm so glad NCT is on top of these things. I can sleep better at night now.
Fred H wrote on Jul 11, 2007 11:48 AM:I too am bored with bees. How about a cute and newsworthy Cockroach story. Cat-stuck-in-a-tree must be getting old too.
With Apologies to Dave Barry wrote on Jul 11, 2007 12:18 PM:"The Legion of Bees, Featuring The Two Dennys" sounds like a great name for a band.
B wrote on Jul 11, 2007 4:01 PM:Never mind the first comments, I appreciate this story. I was fortunate enough to be at home two months ago when a few "scouts" were checking out a crevice on the side wall of my home. I sprayed them with Windex until they went away, then I fixed the problem so more bees wouldn't come. If I wouldn't have been home, I would've had 2000 new "neighbors" within an hour...
...Atch wrote on Jul 11, 2007 4:37 PM:I think this story is relevant for the fact that the bee population has been diminishing throughout the years. I hope they don't kill them and just relocate them somewhere else.
steve@getipm.com wrote on Jul 12, 2007 11:22 AM:How to kill pests without killing yourself or the earth...... There are about 50 to 60 million insect species on earth - we have named only about 1 million and there are only about 1 thousand pest species - already over 50% of these thousand pests are already resistant to our volatile, dangerous, synthetic pesticide POISONS. We accidentally lose about 25,000 to 100,000 species of insects, plants and animals every year due to "man's footprint". But, after poisoning the entire world and contaminating every living thing for over 60 years with these dangerous and ineffective pesticide POISONS we have not even controlled much less eliminated even one pest species and every year we use/misuse more and more pesticide POISONS to try to "keep up"! Even with all of this expensive pollution - we lose more and more crops and lives to these thousand pests every year. We are losing the war against these thousand pests mainly because we insist on using only synthetic pesticide POISONS and fertilizers There has been a severe "knowledge drought" - a worldwide decline in agricultural R&D, especially in production research and safe, more effective pest control since the advent of synthetic pesticide POISONS and fertilizers. Today we are like lemmings running to the sea insisting that is the "right way". The greatest challenge facing humanity this century is the necessity for us to double our global food production with less land, less water, less nutrients, less science, frequent droughts, more and more contamination and ever-increasing pest damage. National Poison Prevention Week, March 18-24,2007 was created to highlight the dangers of poisoning and how to prevent it. One study shows that about 70,000 children in the USA were involved in common household pesticide-related (acute) poisonings or exposures in 2004. It is estimated that 300,000 farm workers suffer acute pesticide poisoning each year in the United States - No one is checking chronic contamination. In order to try to help "stem the tide", I have just finished re-writing my IPM encyclopedia entitled: THE BEST CONTROL II, that contains over 2,800 safe and far more effective alternatives to pesticide POISONS. This latest copyrighted work is about 1,800 pages in length and is now being updated chapter by chapter at my new website... This new website ... has all of my original IPM encyclopedia in its original form and will continue to have more and more free, updated Chapters every week. Right now all we have left to update are Chapters 14 and 39. All of these copyrighted items are free for you to read and/or download. There is simply no need to POISON yourself or your family or to have any pest problems. ... "An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come." --Victor Hugo
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