Homeowner surprised by swarm of 30,000 bees

Originally Published: 22 APR 26 15:31 ET

By Andrew Adams, KSL

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    KAYSVILLE, Utah (KSL) -- It was an unlikely problem that showed up out of the blue Monday, just outside Jeannette Stokes Memmott's front door.

Bees.

And just not a few. There were thousands.

"It was quite the sight," she said. "I thought, 'What do we do, what do we do, what do we do, who do we call, who do we call?'"

Though she initially feared they were yellow jackets, Memmott soon discovered they were honey bees.

"We thought, 'No, no, no, no, no — we can't spray the honeybees," she said.

Instead, they reached out to the Davis County Beekeepers Association. It turned out one of its beekeepers was a neighbor.

"I would probably say we had around 30,000 bees on the column," said the beekeeper, Shane Hughes.

Hughes carefully extracted the bees from the column and transferred them into a bee box, although he acknowledged there were still some bees left inside, including possibly the queen.

Swarming, he explained, is a natural part of bee reproduction this time of year, although sometimes it can prove to be a little unpredictable.

"What swarming does (is) if you have a really healthy and vigorous hive, naturally, the bees want to split and make two really strong hives, and it's just a way for them to reproduce," Hughes explained. "The queen will hatch and take about half of that hive somewhere else, and we never know where it's going to go."

Memmott said she believed it was possible the bees may have come from another neighbor's home.

"For whatever reason, the hive split, and here they landed right on my very home," Memmott said.

Hughes said on Sunday he was helping a different homeowner with a similar issue.

"It's really hard to find the queen," he said. "Last night, I was in Farmington and had to start tearing off siding of a home and reaching in 2 or 3 feet and trying to pull out every single bee from inside their home."

Hughes said he believes Memmott's bees were Italian, and planned to bring them back to his home. He said those types of bees can produce 80 to 100 pounds of honey per hive.

He said there are beekeeping groups in various counties that can help to mitigate these issues, and people in Davis County who encounter swarms can report them to Brent Rasmussen with the Davis County Beekeepers Association at 801-390-0222.

"Shane came to the rescue," Memmott said of her beekeeper neighbor. "It's fascinating, but I don't want them to live in my home, because I'm told if they get in your attic, you're looking at some trouble."

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