- Lake Worth resident Norm Gitzen didn't mind the more than half-million bees living in the roof of his house until recently. But when the bees started coming into the house, stinging him and his nephew, his love of that cohabitation changed.

Local beekeepers started removing at least 700,000 bees from a tower above his breakfast nook on Tuesday, filling four buckets with honey weighing close to 65 pounds.

"This will become a fantastic nuisance ... because they will grow and grow," said Palm Beach County Beekeepers Association President Ute Hartmann.

The weight of the hives could collapse Gitzen's roof, while the honey could attract ants and rodents, Hartmann said.

Gitzen said at first the bees were "kind of mesmerizing," and he often sweetened his morning coffee with honey dripping from the hives.

Valentine Toncz, who helped remove the bees, will keep half of them, Gitzen said, while the rest will be returned to his house - in bee boxes.

State law requires bees to be kept in boxes with movable frames, inspected annually for mites and other honeybee pests.

just a point of refrence there are about 200 worker bees to the average colony with a queen and some drones. So thats a lot of freaking bees.

This is more common than you think. friend of mine had a house in Farragut and a colony of wasps or bees had bored their nest into the frame of his house all the way across his north wall....making a a 20 ft horizontal spiraling hive between the brick and the insulation and drywall.......he had it removed, but had to do a lot of house repairs to do it!

Reminds me of something that happened to a Memphis staff person (why is it always Memphis?), she went out to her car to leave for the day, and the whole thing was covered in bees.

Needless to say, she freaked. Ended up with the police, fire department, and some sort of environmental guy out there all trying to figure it out.

Mistress Eve(L) wrote:This is more common than you think. friend of mine had a house in Farragut and a colony of wasps or bees had bored their nest into the frame of his house all the way across his north wall....making a a 20 ft horizontal spiraling hive between the brick and the insulation and drywall.......he had it removed, but had to do a lot of house repairs to do it!

Those are carpenter bees. They do that.

But from what I get of the story that guy had a colony of bees in his house. I know of people who keep a bee hive or 2 on the roofs of there house cause the bees fly out not down so he was able to keep bees in a subdivision and his neighbors never knew about it.

white_darkness wrote:Reminds me of something that happened to a Memphis staff person (why is it always Memphis?), she went out to her car to leave for the day, and the whole thing was covered in bees.

Needless to say, she freaked. Ended up with the police, fire department, and some sort of environmental guy out there all trying to figure it out.

As the resident Memphian.... There is a colony of carpenter bees in the south wall of my house... maybe a hundred or so.... Then there are the wasps... Every summer I kill a few hundred nesting in the east wall of my house. And last summer I decided to open up my rx-7 that's been sitting in the back driveway for two years without being moved. I found five seperate nests (I'm sure there are more), the largest of which was almost 2 feet across. Went through 5 cans of wasp spray and counted over 200 corpses - and a easily twice that got away.

I don't know what it is about Memphis... you should see the spider farm in my garage....