OMAHA, Neb. ( Associated Press) – About 6,000 bees were recently removed from inside the walls of an Omaha couple’s 100-year-old home.
Thomas and Marylu Gouttierre told the Omaha World Herald they planted bee-friendly flowers outside their downtown home, but they never expected the bees to move in.
The bees probably infiltrated through a hole in the mortar of its brick exterior. The Gouttierres discovered them after noticing many bees flying outside their kitchen window and finding about 30 in a bedroom on the second floor.
“If you put your ears to the wall, you could hear the buzzing,” says Thomas Gouttierre, who is a retired dean at the University of Nebraska in Omaha who previously led the Center for Afghanistan Studies there.
Gouttierre said their first thought was to call an exterminator, “but we have read and there are many amazing programs on PBS ‘Nature’ about how important bees are to pollinate the world in which we live.”
The couple contacted two members of the Omaha Bee Club who asked for $ 600 to relocate the bees safely. Larry Cottle of Countryside Acres Aviary cut a hole in the wall of the house before Ryan Gilligan of Gilly’s Gold sucked the bees in a box to move them. Three honeycombs about 2 inches (5 centimeters) thick and about 9 inches (23 centimeters) in diameter were inside the wall.
Gouttierre said he and his wife tasted some of the honey before Gilligan took the bees home to its surface.
Gilligan said he has removed bees from a number of homes, apartments, barns and trees over the past seven years. The last house he built before the Gouttierres had 15,000 bees.
