Last week my wife came home to literally hundreds of bees on our front door.  They were swarming!  Over the next couple of days we had more afternoon visitors, but in fewer numbers until eventually they went away.

The first day was a bit of a sticky situation, and the following days we had to peek out the peep hole to check for bees before opening the front door.  Luckily my wife could get into the house through the garage, but it got me to thinking about why these bees would choose to hang out at our door for the afternoon when they should be out making honey.

 

Our front yard is very butterfly and hummingbird friendly, which means it’s pretty bee friendly as well.  During the summer months we usually have half a dozen butterflies and a pair of hummingbirds flitting about the various California native flowers.  There’s probably a dozen or so bees doing the pollination rounds as well.

I found a great web site here by the California State Bee Keeper Association that talks about what a swarm is and what to do about it.  In  a nutshell, swarming is how a bee colony reproduces, with about half the bees and the old queen out looking for a new nest.  A scout bee decided that our front door would be a good place to set up a home (and why not with all the flowers right there for them) and landed there and secreted the nasanov pheromone to call the swarm.  Yes, that’s right, bees were having sex with my front door.

If they had set up a nest, we could have called a either a bee keeper or an exterminator to come get the swarm.  The bee keepers would collect the swarm in a box and take them back to an empty hive to make honey.  An exterminator would have sprayed them with either soapy water to drown them, or toxic chemicals to outright kill them.

Bees can be dangerous, especially as the Africanized Killer Bees make their way up the coast.  You can read about attacks like this one on the web.  So my advice is of course to stay far away from them.  But at the same time, we need bees due to their pollination services especially in California where we have so many citrus and almond groves.  And with the current bee population suffering from colony collapse disorder, I’m glad we were able to let them live in peace and move away from the front door to a hopefully safer location for all involved.