‘Humongous’ bee hive in Virginia home’s living room ceiling held 100 pounds of honey
Complaints about bees flying out of an apartment’s air conditioning ducts led to a frightening discovery Monday in Richmond, Virginia.
A massive 8-foot-long hive was hidden in the ceiling over the living room, according Virginia Wildlife Management and Control, a wildlife control company.
That’s big enough to support 100,000 to 150,000 bees, but luckily “it was not fully occupied” when the discovery was made, company owner Rich Perry told McClatchy News.
“This thing was humongous and it was inside the building, which is extremely unusual,” he said. “We’ve dealt with hives before on the outsides of homes, in outside walls, but never inside the ceiling.”
The location of the apartment was not been revealed, but it was between tenants at the time — a detail that may explain why no one heard thousands of bees buzzing in the walls.
Perry estimates the hive of Italian bees was at least 2 years old, and it had defied a prior attempt by the property owner to remove it last summer.
“They called me up a few days ago and said: ‘There are bees still coming out through the duct work,” Perry told McClatchy News. “We used saws to cut a 6-foot opening the ceiling, and we kept having to make the hole bigger. The hive just kept going and going.”
He believes the bees got in through holes in the exterior siding and found a perfect home between rafters and sheet rock.
Virginia Wildlife Management and Control has a “no kill” policy with bee hives, he says, and great effort was taken to find the queen. His hope was to move her and her entourage to a new location.
However, the queen could not be found and the hive could not be saved, he told McClatchy News.
Among the surprising details Perry shared in a Facebook post was the bees left behind 80 to 100 pounds of honey. That led some people to ask if raw honey was literally “dripping from the ceiling” or if the living room felt “like it was vibrating.”
“I would die,” posted Hayli Maloney on Facebook.
“Could you just put a tap in it and have a honey tap on the wall?” George Sypsomos asked on Facebook. “Can I have one of these installed in my wall?”
In fact, Perry told McClatchy News he did try to save as much of the honey as possible, but only 15 to 20 pounds was found to be uncontaminated enough to eat.
