Pestforce saves care home from 50,000 bees

Pestforce saved the day by safely relocating a huge colony of more than 50,000 bees who had built their home in a care home chimney.

As we become increasingly aware of how important bees are to our eco-system, many of us are reluctant to harm them even if they’re a little too close for comfort. So when residential home manager Liz Dyson found more than 50,000 bees nesting in the chimney of the care home, who had built an incredible 10ft wall of honeycomb in their time up there, she decided to call in Pestforce.

Although the bees had been living up there for an estimated five years, Dyson was desperate not to kill them or harm them by moving them elsewhere. It was only when urgent roofing work needed to be done that she was forced to take action. Many pest removal companies could only offer extermination services, until Dyson stumbled across Rob Davies.

The passionate conservationist, who works for pest control franchise Pestforce in Shropshire, designed and built his very own ‘Bee Vacuum’. The innovative device sucks bees up into a hoover-like container, but does them no harm and stores them safely until they can be released into their new homes. Commenting on the mammoth removal, Davies said:

'The removal took about seven hours, it was a big job. I never exterminate animals so that was never an option for me, I'm a conservationist and want to protect them. We had to remove some of the bricks in the chimney to get to the bees further down. I used a specially designed 'Bee Vacuum', which sucks up the bees but stores them in a box that can be transferred to a safe location for them to live. In this instance they were taken to a hive in Oswestry, Shropshire. We were able to remove all of the honeycomb without any falling down the chimney.'

With more than 65 successful franchisees across the country, Pestforce is one of the UK’s largest pest control franchises.