Honey Bees in Whatcom County

The short version, first

We do not treat honey bees. Not in a tree, not in a swarm on a fence post, and not in a wall.

That is a settled position rather than a case-by-case judgment, so there is no point burying it four screens down. If what you have is Apis mellifera, the work in front of you is either nothing at all or a beekeeper and a carpenter, and this page is about telling those two situations apart and pointing you at the right one.

Two things follow that are worth saying immediately.

A great many honey bee calls are not honey bees. In late summer especially, what is at the table is a western yellowjacket. Bees are hairy and rounded; yellowjackets are smooth, shiny, narrow-waisted and faster. More usefully, honey bees have no interest in your food or your drink. UC IPM’s own distinction is that honey bees are less brightly striped than yellowjackets and carry more hair. If it is on your plate in September, it is a wasp, and that is wasp and hornet control.

Even when it is honey bees, the usual answer is that nobody needs to do anything. Most of these calls end with a description over the phone and a household that does not need a service.

The question that decides everything: swarm or colony

There are exactly two situations, they look superficially similar to somebody who has not seen both, and they call for completely different responses.

A swarm is a colony in transit. It appears suddenly, hangs in the open as a dense clustered mass on a branch, a fence rail, a wall, a bicycle or a car mirror, and it is doing nothing except waiting. It has no comb, no brood and no stores. It is temporary.

An established colony is inside something. There is no visible mass of bees — only steady two-way traffic at one small opening in a building — and it has been going on for weeks or seasons rather than hours. Behind that opening is comb, brood and honey.

The distinguishing questions are simple and you can answer all of them from the ground.

How long has it been there? Hours or a day points at a swarm. Weeks points at a colony.

Can you see the bees themselves in a mass? A cluster hanging in the open is a swarm. Bees disappearing into a hole are a colony.

Is the cluster getting smaller without flying away? UC IPM notes that a shrinking cluster that has not departed generally means they are moving in — that is a swarm becoming a colony, in a cavity somewhere near where it was hanging.

Is there a sound or a warmth? A continuous low hum audible from inside a quiet room, or a patch of wall that feels warm, belongs to an established colony.

Swarms: the situation that needs nobody

A swarm is how a honey bee colony reproduces. When a hive outgrows its cavity, the existing queen leaves with a large share of the workers, and the colony left behind raises a new queen. The departing group flies a short distance — often only a hundred yards or two — settles on the first convenient object, and forms a cluster while scout bees go out looking for a permanent cavity.

Three things about that are worth knowing, and all three argue for doing nothing.

They are about as harmless as honey bees ever get. WSU describes swarming bees as extremely docile, because they are not guarding a hive or resources, and they have filled up on honey before leaving. There is nothing behind them to defend. That is not an invitation to poke one, but a swarm on a fence twenty feet from a doorway is not the emergency it looks like.

They leave on their own. Scouts reach a decision anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days after the cluster forms, and then the whole mass departs. A great many swarm calls resolve before anybody arrives.

Somebody wants them. A collected swarm is a free colony, which is genuinely valuable to a beekeeper, and swarm collection is routinely done at no charge for exactly that reason.

Swarm season here runs through spring and into early summer, with the bulk of it in the warmer weeks from late April onward. A cluster appearing in that window on a mild afternoon is the normal, expected version of this event.

What to do: keep children and pets away from the immediate area, do not throw water at it, do not spray it, and either wait it out or call a beekeeper if it is somewhere genuinely inconvenient. What not to do is treat it as an infestation, because a swarm is the cheapest possible outcome — a colony that has not yet chosen your wall.

Established colonies in a structure

This is the situation this page exists for, and it is a building problem wearing an insect costume.

If scouts choose a cavity in your house — a stud bay, a soffit run, a floor void, a chimney flue, the space above a bay window — the colony moves in and starts building wax comb immediately, because it arrives short on food and has to make somewhere to put what it collects. From that point it is not going anywhere.

The signs, in the order people usually notice them:

Directional traffic at one point, continuing over weeks rather than days. Foraging bees in a garden move around; a colony’s traffic runs on a line to a single opening.

A hum. Continuous, low, audible against a wall from inside when a room is quiet, most obviously at night.

Warmth in a wall or ceiling area, because a colony holds its brood nest at a regulated temperature.

Bees appearing inside the room, singly, at a window, where the cavity connects to living space through a light fitting or an unsealed penetration.

Staining and seepage, in a colony that has been there long enough to accumulate stores, showing as a dark patch coming through drywall or down siding. By that stage there is real weight in the wall.

The older housing in Bellingham’s Lettered Streets, Columbia, Sunnyland and York gives scouts what they want — uncapped chimneys, open soffits and generous cavities. Waterfront and seasonal property in Blaine, Birch Bay and Semiahmoo produces the version where a colony establishes across a summer with nobody in the building to notice. Out in the agricultural corridor around Lynden, Everson and Nooksack, managed hives are part of the working landscape and berry pollination depends on them, which makes correct identification matter more there than anywhere else in the county.

Why killing a wall colony is the wrong answer

This is the part worth reading even if you are inclined to skip to the end, because it is the decision people most often get wrong and the one that costs the most.

A colony that has been in a cavity for a season represents pounds of wax comb, brood and stored honey. Kill the bees and every bit of that stays exactly where it is, with nothing left to maintain it.

The honey ferments. Unattended stores absorb moisture and ferment, and the gas produced bursts the wax cappings holding honey in the cells. That is UC IPM’s description of the mechanism, and it is the trigger for everything that follows.

Then gravity takes over. Released honey runs down whatever surface it is attached to until it meets something horizontal — a plate, a header, a ceiling — and pools there. From a stud bay that means it works its way through drywall and down the face of a wall. From a floor void it means a ceiling below.

Dead bees rot in place. Bodies that cannot be removed hold their moisture and decompose, and the odor from a substantial colony is not subtle.

And the residue keeps attracting insects. Wax, dead brood and fermenting honey are a long-term food source in a warm dry cavity. What arrives to eat it — ants, wax moths, carpet beetles, larder beetles — is a second problem that can run for years after the bees are gone.

Households that pay to have a wall colony poisoned frequently pay again the following summer for a considerably messier job, and by then the honey has been in the framing for twelve months.

There is a second argument, and we would make it even if the first one did not exist: destroying a functioning colony that somebody would happily have collected is a poor trade in a county whose berry and tree fruit production leans on pollination.

What a proper removal actually involves

The correct resolution for an established colony is a cut-out, and it is honest to say up front that it is a real piece of work.

The cavity is opened. From outside where the cladding allows it, from inside where it does not. Locating the colony precisely before cutting matters, because a soffit can run the length of a building and comb does not always sit where the entrance is.

The bees and all of the comb come out. Not most of it. Comb left behind is the same problem as comb left behind after a poisoning, and brood comb is generally transferred so the colony can continue.

The cavity is cleaned. Residue and the scent that goes with it, because a cavity that has held bees smells like a home to the next set of scouts. Cleaning it is what stops the site being reoccupied.

Every opening is sealed, not only the one that was being used. UC IPM’s guidance is to close holes down to pencil width, which in practice means going around the whole elevation rather than patching one hole.

Then it is repaired and refinished. That part is carpentry.

That sequence is why a colony in a wall is a beekeeper-and-builder job rather than a pest control job. It also explains the price difference people find surprising: a spray takes twenty minutes and creates a building defect, and a cut-out takes a day and resolves one.

The chimney case, which is its own problem

Flues deserve a paragraph of their own because they are the single most common structural colony site on older housing here and the least forgiving one.

An uncapped chimney is close to an ideal cavity: tall, dry, sheltered, thermally stable, and with one small entrance at the top. Colonies build downward from near the smoke shelf, and by the second season the comb can extend several feet into a shaft that nobody can reach from either end without work.

Two things make it worse than a wall. Access is genuinely difficult, so the removal is more involved and the quotes are higher. And the failure mode of doing nothing is worse, because when honey lets go in a flue it runs into a firebox and out onto a hearth, and the residue is on masonry rather than on framing that can be cut out.

The other thing worth saying plainly: do not light a fire to drive them out. It does not clear the colony reliably, it fills the house with smoke pushed back by comb blocking the flue, and it turns wax into something you now have a chimney sweep’s problem with as well. If there are bees in the flue, the fireplace is out of service until the colony has been dealt with properly.

Capping the chimney afterward is the part that decides whether it happens again.

What people try first, and why it backfires

Almost every difficult honey bee job we hear about got harder because of something done in the first week.

Spraying the entrance. A treated colony is generally not salvageable, which takes the free, clean outcome off the table entirely. It also rarely reaches a colony deep in a cavity, so what you usually get is a partial kill, an agitated remainder, and comb nobody now wants to collect.

Plugging the hole. Bees shut in a cavity do not give up and die quietly. They work at the surrounding material looking for another way out, and in a building the softest direction is frequently inward. Sealing an active entrance is how a colony that was outside becomes a colony inside a room.

Hosing or smoking them. Neither moves an established colony. Both produce a defensive response from an insect that had not previously been defensive toward you.

Waiting to see if they leave. A swarm will. A colony that has started comb will not, and every additional week adds stores to the cavity and cost to the removal. The cheapest moment to act on an established colony is the first week somebody notices the traffic.

Who to call

Start with the WSU Honey Bees and Pollinators Program, which maintains a county-by-county list of swarm removal contacts for Washington — beekeeping associations with swarm teams, and individual collectors. The beekeepers association covering Whatcom County is the other route to the same people, and for a swarm hanging in the open it is usually the only call you need to make.

Worth knowing before you dial: swarm collection and structural removal are different skills, and not everybody who does one does the other. Ask directly whether they do cut-outs, whether they open walls themselves or work alongside a contractor, whether the comb is all coming out, and who is responsible for closing the building back up. Those four questions separate a proper removal from a partial one.

We do not name a specific outfit here, and that is deliberate. Referral fees and quiet arrangements are how a recommendation stops being a recommendation.

Honey bee or bumble bee

The two get confused in both directions, and the practical consequence is small because the answer is the same either way — but the reasoning differs.

Honey bee. Slim, roughly half an inch, amber and brown with fine hair rather than dense fur, and banded but not vividly so. Colonies run into the tens of thousands and are perennial: the colony survives the winter as a cluster and carries on the following year.

Bumble bee. Considerably larger, round, and unmistakably furry, in bold bands of black and yellow with orange or white on some species. Slow, loud, and famously placid away from the nest. Colonies are small — dozens to a few hundred — and strictly annual. The colony dies out in autumn, only new queens overwinter, and the nest is never reused.

That last point is why the recommendation for a bumble bee nest in a compost heap, under a shed or in wall insulation is nearly always to leave it. The situation ends by itself within a season, and the insect is among the most effective pollinators in this region.

Both are worth protecting. Neither gets treated.

A little biology, because it explains the behavior

A honey bee worker has a barbed sting that tears free along with the venom sac when it is used, and the bee dies. That is the reason a foraging honey bee is reluctant to sting anything that is not directly threatening the colony — it is a one-time act with a fatal cost, and the insect behaves accordingly. A yellowjacket has no such constraint, which is most of why the two feel so different to be near.

Swarming is not an accident or a sign of anything wrong. It is how a colony reproduces: the mother queen departs with a large share of the workers, and the old nest raises a replacement from among several daughter queens. A swarm passing through your garden is a colony doing what it is supposed to do.

And the comb is made by the bees themselves, from wax secreted as scales and worked into cells. Understanding that comb is manufactured rather than collected makes the wall-cavity problem intuitive: the colony has spent months building a structure, filling it, and capping it, and none of that disappears when the bees do.

Keeping a colony from moving in

Scouts are looking for a dry enclosed cavity of the right volume with a small, defensible entrance. Buildings offer plenty, and the ones that get colonies tend to get them more than once.

Cap the chimney. An open flue is one of the most reliable colony sites on a house and among the hardest to resolve afterward, because access is poor and the comb ends up well down the shaft.

Screen the vents — gable, soffit, ridge, dryer — in intact metal rather than cracked plastic louvers.

Close the gaps where siding meets trim, at soffit returns, around window and door framing, and at every utility penetration.

Deal with a former colony site properly. A cavity that has held bees retains scent that actively draws new scouts, so emptying it is not the same as finishing it. It needs cleaning and sealing.

Look again after re-roofing or new siding. Trades create new openings, and spring scouts find them quickly.

That work is exclusion and repairs, and the same openings admit rodents, wasps and cluster flies, so it rarely gets done for one reason alone.

What we will actually do

Identify it, at no charge. A photograph usually settles it in under a minute, and a large share of these calls end right there with advice and no service.

Point you to a beekeeper for a swarm or an established colony, and tell you what to ask them.

Handle it as wasps when it turns out to be yellowjackets, hornets or paper wasps, which is most of the time.

Close the building afterward. Once a colony has been removed by somebody else, sealing the cavity and the other openings on the structure is ordinary exclusion work and it is the step most often skipped.

Tell you when the answer is nothing. Mason bees in spring, mining bees in a lawn, a slow bee on a path in September at the end of its life — none of that needs anybody.

If somebody in the household is allergic

This changes the urgency without changing the recommendation.

A diagnosed sting allergy makes proximity to any colony a medical question rather than a preference, and the advice elsewhere on this page to wait a swarm out does not apply. What does still apply is that the resolution is a beekeeper working quickly rather than a poisoning, because the fast answer and the destructive answer are not the same answer.

Say so at the first phone call. It changes what we recommend and how quickly we push to get somebody there.

Related work

Most calls that begin as bees end at wasp and hornet control, and the ground-nesting species behind that is the western yellowjacket. Our position on bees generally, including bumble bees, mason bees and mining bees, is set out on bee removal. Round clean holes in fascia or deck rails are a different insect entirely and belong with wood-boring bee and beetle control. Closing a cavity once a colony has been taken out is exclusion and repairs.