08/01/2026
This explains why bee cut outs are so important. Please don’t spray the bees!!
A story on how apartment management spraying a bee hive with pesticide and how their continued neglect led to an apartment being condemned by the city, and a good lesson on what not to do when you have a colony of bees living within a cavity of the structure.
A local beekeeper reached out to me on Friday and said management of an apartment complex had reached out to him about a bee issue and it sounded like a cutout instead of a swarm so he referred it to me and gave me contact info and all the details he had. I was already in Stillwater dropping a package off at FedEx and was within two miles of the complex so I just ran over there real quick, see what I could figure out before I called management. I spotted where they were coming in but they didn’t look to be doing well and I decided to knock on the door and see if tenants were there by chance and they were. I didn’t have my thermal camera with me and couldn’t really see a whole lot but they told me the whole saga of dealing with these bees for the past year. They’ve had bees entering their apartment for a year and complaints have fallen on deaf ears. Finally management decided to do something and that something was to spray them with pesticide. For the past 10 days they have had small hive beetle larvae crawling all over their apartment. They’ve had them drop from light fixtures and fans in the ceiling and also find them crawling out from the carpet in one of the bedrooms where the hive is. I don’t mean a few, I mean hundreds and hundreds of them. Management gaslit them on the issue so they sent specimens to OSU to confirm they were SHB larvae.
I come back an hour later with my thermal camera and confirm where the bees are, they are basically right inside the entrance in the joist space between the first floor ceiling and second floor flooring and right at the top of the wall. Very clear heat signature, but I can tell their population has diminished significantly as it was not a large area. The colony was robust and able to defend itself from pests, now it is barely alive and pests have taken over as the few bees that are remaining can’t defend the hive. If you have never seen a SHB slime out it is disgusting, if bad enough you will literally see slime pouring out of the bottom board as you walk up to a hive. What is going on in that ceiling and wall based on the hundreds of SHB larvae they have found crawling and collected in a jar is really gross, we are talking SHB slime running all down that wall.
That whole stud cavity needs drywall and insulation removed, maybe two stud cavities, the ceiling needs a few square feet of drywall removed, then bees and comb removed. Then completely clean those cavities including scrubbing them with a bleach solution and then allowing them to dry for a couple of days before re-insulating and repairing the drywall. It sounds simple but is a lot of work. I went over to the management office and there were four of them there but not the right guy so I spoke to him on the phone and told him what needed to be done and gave them my price. He said to plan on doing it and I said I could do it on this past Tuesday I just needed to make sure I heard back from him on approval from senior apartment management that he said he needed. That was on Friday, the same day that code enforcement also came to check things out. It was Monday afternoon and I still hadn’t heard anything until the tenants reached out and said management told them they were getting someone else out there to take care of it but that code enforcement had stopped by and said they issued a citation to management for not dealing with the issue. It’s Friday and they still haven’t done anything to rectify the issue so code enforcement took note of the live larvae crawling around the apartment and condemned it. City said the unit is uninhabitable so now the tenants are in a hotel.
The lesson here is that when you spray a colony of bees living in a structure then when they die what they leave behind is a smorgasbord for small hive beetles, ants, roaches and other pests. You are trying to avoid a reasonable expense for extraction and repairs and instead turn it into a massive expense as it still needs to be cutout and cleaned in the end and you will have spent more money on that, pest control expenses down the road and roaches are expensive for apartments to treat for, and now you’ve gotten fines from code enforcement as well as gotten the apartment condemned and paying for a hotel room for the tenants. Doing the right thing and working with a reputable beekeeper that does cutouts professionally to remove them is much cheaper than the path they chose.
