Bee Rescue and Bee Removal Services in Orange County

bee removal - busy hiveSo you have bees living in your orange tree, or perhaps zipping in and out of the wall of your house.  You appreciate bees, you understand their important place in the ecosystem, but you have a lovely house in suburban Orange County, and these bees can’t stay here, someone is going to get stung.  But you don’t want to have them killed, what do you do?

Bee Busters can perform a live removal, rescuing those bees and placing them in a hive box somewhere where they are happy and we are happy to have them. Many other companies also say they do bee rescues, but there are several reasons why you should go with Bee Busters.

Most primarily, most other companies advertising “bee rescue” are not actually engaged in beekeeping.  Where do these bees go after they are “rescued?”  We fear it is often a sad fraud upon their trusting customers – the bees may be alive as they enter the high powered vacuum, a large portion are probably still alive in there as the truck drives away, but what happens when it gets around the corner?  Here in Orange County, there is, unfortunately, bee rescue and “bee rescue.”

These other “bee rescue” companies, and there seem to be a lot of them these days, have a lot of pictures and videos up on their websites of them “rescuing,” bees, but strangely most have nary a single shot of a post-rescued bee.  Look at our photo gallery and you’ll see pages of shots of our beekeeping operations, in-house honey processing, and all other aspects of professional beekeeping, because that’s exactly what we do.

bee removal servicesEven if these other companies were giving their bees to third party professional beekeepers, as they sometimes claim, don’t you think they would at least once take a picture of the bee yard they delivered the bees to, if not the bees being set up in a hive box?  Sadly, the post-“rescue” photo op, if there was one, would probably be a shopvac full of dead bees being dumped into a dumpster, while in the background the “rescuer” proudly updates the internet about another successful rescue.

Because we are professional beekeepers we thoroughly understand how to manage bees and have a wide array of techniques at our disposal.  Other companies have one trick they keep using, a harmful high powered shopvac or a very time consuming trap-out, but as the situation warrants, we can choose the most appropriate of an array of beekeeping techniques that will be safest for the public and the bees, economical and quick.

Here in Orange County there is pervasive “Africanized honeybee” (AHB) genetics. That’s the “killer bee” you’ve heard about, and it means that some bees in this area will have a tendency to respond overwhelmingly when stirred up.  Public safety must always be the number one priority, much as we love bees. And we’re not going to lie to you, if we start a rescue operation and the bees become very aggressive and become a danger to the surrounding public, we are prepared to use the best equipment and materials available to us as licensed branch 2 pest control operators to shut down that hive immediately.  This would be an unfortunate end for a colony of bees that you and I both had wanted to save, but I think we can all agree we’d all rather it ended that way then have a city block evacuated, dozens stung, dogs killed (locked in a backyard they often can’t escape when bees start stinging).

bee removal teamMost of our “bee rescue” competitors do not have pest control licenses or experience, and if the situation gets out of their control, what happens? It’s like playing with fire without a fire extinguisher. And I’ll tell you what happens, because we’ve seen it before. The police have to come and cordon off the whole block, the 911 dispatcher calls us, and by the time we arrive someone’s in the hospital and there’s news vans out front.

So if you have bees that need saving, please give us a call. If you’re going to call around to other companies, go ahead and ask them where they’re putting the bees, maybe ask them if they have any honey to sell or if their beekeeper does — if they don’t have honey and can’t think of a beekeeper offhand, you can pretty well bet they’re not actually doing anything with live bees.

BEE REMOVAL SERVICE LOCATIONS:
2024/03/18