OMAHA, Neb. — About 6,000 bees have been not too long ago removed from inside the partitions of an Omaha couple’s 100-year-old home.
Thomas and Marylu Gouttierre told the Omaha World-Herald they’ve been planting bee-friendly flowers exterior their midtown home, however they by no means anticipated the bees to maneuver in.
The bees doubtless infiltrated by a gap within the mortar of its brick exterior. The Gouttierres found them after noticing many bees flying exterior their kitchen window and located about 30 in a second-floor bed room.
“If you put your ears to the wall you could hear the buzzing,” mentioned Thomas Gouttierre, who’s a retired dean on the University of Nebraska at Omaha who used to steer the Center for Afghanistan Studies there.
Gouttierre mentioned their first thought was to name an exterminator, “but we’ve been reading and there are a lot of great shows on PBS ‘Nature’ about how important bees are to pollinating the world in which we live.”
The couple contacted two members of the Omaha Bee Club who charged $600 to securely relocate the bees. Larry Cottle of Countryside Acres Aviary reduce a gap within the wall of the home earlier than Ryan Gilligan of Gilly’s Gold vacuumed the bees right into a field to maneuver them. Three honeycombs about 2 inches thick and roughly 9 inches in diameter have been inside the wall.
Gouttierre mentioned he and his spouse tasted some of the honey earlier than Gilligan took the bees home to his acreage.
Gilligan mentioned he has removed bees from a quantity of properties, flats, barns and bushes prior to now seven years. The final home he did earlier than the Gouttierres’ had 15,000 bees.