Why not Kill Them

First of all you’ll have a very hard time doing this.  Imagine if there are typically 40,000 honeybees coming and going from a small hole and there you stand with a can of Wasp and Hornet Killer.  You’ll most likely only make them very, very angry.  Usually honeybees are not aggressive, but if you disturb them and threaten their hive and their queen, they’ll be justifiably a little on the cantakerous side!  And by the way, what you see coming and going from that hole is only the tip of the ice berg.

Secondly, let’s say you are somehow successful in killing them.  Maybe you’ve wasted your money by hiring an exterminating company.  Now you have a lot of chemicals in a cavity of your home and 40,000 (or more) dead bees.  They stink.  If you gathered that number of bees and rolled them up you’d have the equivalent of at least a dead cat in your home. 

The next little treat you’ll experience is wax moths.  Wax moths are in all bee hives, but while the bees are available to keep them in check they pose no problem.  Without live bees the wax moths begin eating the wax.  Bees produce this wax in abundance as a place to store their honey, pollen, and keep their babies.  The wax moths don’t care about anything but the wax.  Now you have oozing, dripping honey…potentially lots of it.

The wax moths will nibble small cavities into the wood work of your joists or wall studs (not a structural problem, but they leave their cocoons there).  Their cocoons hatch out and now you have hundreds of small grey moths.  Sometimes these don’t get into the house itself, but often they do, making their way towards light especially when their food source is gone.