The Hancock-Henderson Quill, Inc.

A Honey Of A Problem

by Dessa Rodeffer, Quill Publisher/Owner

16 July 2003

Bees annually buzz around a back room window in our main newspaper office in Stronghurst, and we never gave it too much thought, except to get out a bug spray and try to kill them.

Someone even told me WD-40 would work.

We knew when the temperatures would drop below 40 degrees - that would be the end of them for the time being.

They never were aggressive and we had stopped using the old mailing room quite some time ago, and only use it now for storage.

Last fall when Shirley went into the back room she noticed a sticky mess over a lot of my boxes of Christmas decorations as well as on the floor. It seemed to have come from the ceiling.

After checking it out several times, we came to the conclusion it was honey but an inspection could never reveal where it was coming from.

After lifting out a panel of the lowered ceiling and climbing high on a ladder with a flashlight, I could see no sign of a problem.

This past week, the bees were back and seemed to be worse in the mail room.

In light of the honey we suspected was coming from somewhere above the ceiling and the extra activity of the bees, I called the pest control experts.

The fellow seemed to be familiar with the problems of bees that have been ignored for a long period of time and suggested that I could have a Honey of a Problem.

Another home owner had let it go so long that honey fell down from the ceiling which they found was inside walls upstairs. It took some major carpenter work as well as spray.

Tuesday morning the pest expert came with his truck and extra help to investigate.

Although I had some tuck-pointing done a few years ago to seal some problems, I hadn't had them all taken care of. The beams were still exposed.

The bees had found they could squeeze between the double beams that had warped over time and the expert thought they were making lots of honey between the floor of the upstairs and the roof of the lower floor.

It looked like to him from the seepage throughout the paneling of the ceiling, that what I thought might have been water was really honey all across the room.

He went to work with excessive spraying to get rid of the bees boring small holes through the floor and spraying all around the area.

Within a week we should see no bees and can then seal the beams...

The queen bee is hopefully trapped inside.

If I want to go to the expense, I can tear all the floor and ceiling in that room apart and clean out the honey, then rebuild it, a lot of expense for something you aren't using much.

It's a honey of a problem since the bees are only guaranteed to be gone for six months and I can't sell the honey after its been sprayed.