How to Prevent Honey Bees From Nesting in Your Home
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How to Prevent Honey Bees From Nesting in Your Home
How to Prevent Honey Bees From Nesting in Your Home
Honey bees play a vital role in the pollination of many plants, including fruit and vegetable crops that people eat. Without the bees’ transport and spreading of pollen, these plants lose their primary means of being fertilized and forming seeds to reproduce. So while we might look at honey bees as a nuisance or something to be feared because of their ability to sting, we shouldn’t aim to actively kill them. But you still don’t want bees to run amok in and around your home to the point where you are perpetually on edge. Therefore, you should seek out how to prevent honey bees from nesting in your home using methods that won’t harm them. We outline several approaches here.
How Do Bees Come to Your Home?
Before you start attempting to stop honey bees from taking up residence in your house, you may benefit from an understanding of how they end up there. The main reason that bees may come to your home is because they are seeking to establish a new colony. They carry out a process called swarming, usually in the spring, where a single colony splits into two or more separate colonies. This is how their populations can grow, since a single colony can become restricting over time.
The original queen moves out with a cluster of worker bees, leaving behind a new queen in the old nest. The group of bees flies to a nearby area, such as a tree, and then waits as scout bees fly about looking for a suitable place to start a new nest. When a scout bee finds a good spot, they’ll call the rest of the bees to it so they can begin building a new nest. You don’t want that spot to be somewhere in your property. So how can you make your home look uninviting to the bees? There are many actions you can take.
How to Prevent Honey Bees From Nesting in Your Home?
Close Off Openings on Your House
A crevice or hole on your house’s exterior is an ideal foundation for honey bees to enter and start constructing a nest since they will have ample shelter from the open environment. When you’re looking for how to prevent honey bees from nesting in your home, you should circle around and inspect the structure from the outside and see if there are any gaps that the bees might fly into. Areas around the roof are primary targets for bees, so pay special attention to them. Close them off by applying sealants such as caulk or sticking on metal mesh woven tightly enough to prevent them from passing through.
Tidy Up Your Yard
Besides your home itself, bees may also settle in nooks and crannies that are found throughout your yard. Remove those objects that aren’t fulfilling any use for you. Large fallen tree branches, machines, and tools that have small, dark spaces are all potential nesting spots. Stow away your belongings inside the garage or another storage area that is indoors where bees won’t reach them and throw away the debris that is scattered about. Your work will have the added benefit of improving the look of your yard as well
Remove Abandoned Nest Remnants
It is a possibility that honey bees have previously lived in your home. Whether bees departed on their own or were removed, if any remnants of their nest are leftover, those remnants can draw in new scouts that pick up the scent of the pheromones left in the honeycomb. You need to be sure that your house is entirely freed of old nest fragments. In addition to the surface of your home, bees that entered into holes before could have formed honeycombs inside the walls or attic. When your home looks clean yet still seems to attract bees, this may be the reason.
Get Bee-Deterring Plants
As touched upon, numerous plants are pollinated by bees, so they are adapted to attract rather than repel them. However, there are a few select species of plants that bees generally dislike. By placing them outside your home, you could make your home less attractive to them. A few varieties that you might try are red geraniums, cucumber, citronella, and wormwood.
Geraniums with red flowers don’t appear alluring as other flowers do to bees because the bees are blind to red. The flowers also emit a smell that bees don’t like. Moreover, bees don’t like the taste of cucumber, so planting it in your yard or even just tossing some slices around can help repel them. Citronella and wormwood both have smells that bees shun.
In the same vein, you might consider cultivating fewer flowering plants in your yard so that there are fewer blooms present to attract honey bees looking for nectar and pollen in the first place.
Call a Bee Removal Service Call us today 214-227-7562
Sometimes, it may too dangerous for you to attempt to interact with bees around your home. Or you may be unable to resolve bee-related issues because they are beyond the scope of what you are comfortable tackling. Honeycombs inside your home’s walls or roof are a good illustration, as you might need to cut open portions of the structure to reach them.
Honey Bee Rescue is just the company to contact when you have problems with honey bees. We perform bee removal in Dallas and surrounding areas and relocate the bees to our established apiaries using equipment such as bee-safe vacuums to take them off your property without hurting them. Call us today.