Hi everyone. I found this forum while educating myself about my wall of bees. Nice to find some Canadian information. A couple of weeks ago my wife noticed bees going under the vinyl siding near a bottom corner of the house. We took an empty can and started to listen in the walls, and found a basement wall area of about 10' x 3' that had bees buzzing behind it. No can required to hear them if you knock on the wall either. I taped off the area, which is shown below. With that large an area, I was initially thinking honey bees but we staked out the opening one sunny afternoon, took some pictures and had the bumblebees confirmed by a beekeeper. He said we likely have several hives in the wall, which makes sense since what I have read is that they are typically about 150-200 bees in their hives. My understanding is that they are all going to depart come winter and my walls will be empty, so I could pull it down in January to clean up and block the opening, etc. since only the Queens survive and they leave the hive as well. If so, is there any risk of the bees making another opening, possibly to the inside of the house? Or is it fine, as long as the outside one stays open? There may be a few spots where the only block is a couple of inches of pink fiberglass insulation. I would guess that there are likely a 1,000 bees or so resident in the house, and while I would rather they not be there I can wait it out if they mind their own bee's wax (really hard not to make bee jokes around the house - makes the teenagers groan :-) ).
Should be fine, they only use existing holes and don't cut new ones, particularly not in something as tough as fibreglass. They'll 'bee' a very valuable contribution to your local environment.
