Neighbor wants to kill the bumblebees!

The bumblebees are about 2 and on half inches long at most, fuzzy and round bodied.
Don't know if they are carpenter bees or not, they could be. They move out of your way
when you shake the flower stem them are on.

She informed me yesterday that they are having an exterminator come.
He is supposed to be a bee specialist, according to her son the plumber.

The bees have commited the crime of nesting in the gutter of her garage
eves, right across from my organic veg garden!

At this point I have to worry about
covering my flowering plants and the fact that these big fuzzy bees are the ONLY
pollinators I have seen for two years, despite the fact that bee keeping has been the
new urban trend round Brooklyn way those same two years.

To give Mrs. M. credit, she knew I would be concerned. She has seen me picking the lavender
in the company of these bees without harm, but another son went close to the gutter on a ladder,
and got freaked out, and they did not think it safe to let the grandchildren out in the yard on
a recent fine day.

I....played in the scrubby suburban third growth woods and big undeveloped suburban tracts as a child. I even spent days under flowering bushes reading...

When I was little I was sick a lot- ear nose and throat infections all the time- tonsils out at age _two.
It turned out I was allergic to a ton of stuff (like hay mold in the horse barns when I adored horses!)...
but _not bee stings.

I got stung and lived through it many times. It seems as if you need tofind out if you kid is allergic to bee stings and one or two other "biggies" that can be fatal, and if not, let them go _play_.

These neighbor grandkids are almost never outside when they visit -
nobody in that family is except to mow the lawn or shovel snow. I hope they let the children
wear dirty play clothes and play outside at home? (Not the girls, I betcha! Grrrr!)

I told her that putting a spray in the air would spread further, reduce concentration of the
chemical and waste money. I told her I wanted to talk to the exterminator. She seemed to listen.

Can anyone help me with information about alternatives to killing the bees, or at least a way that
will not spread via the air?
Does anyone know how to attract pollinators after the massacre?
Can anyone talk me down off the urge to whack them about the head and shoulders with a copy of
"Last Child in the Woods" ?

(trying to remain reasonable, someone has to!)
Heather

Bumblebees can be amazingly tolerant... we have moved nests out of our composter, and out of a birdhouse, without causing much of any fuss, and without being stung. (Note: The nests were not destroyed, but just placed in other similar places, out of the way, where the colony continued doing its thing.)

This message was edited May 12, 2015 3:01 PM

Hopefully the exterminator has some sense and smokes the hive, removing it like Altagardener said. When you smoke the hive, the bees become half asleep allowing the tech to relocate the hive. It's not something I'd want to do myself but it's definitely something a trained technician can handle. If the nest was in my gutter, I'd do the same thing as her but I would be insistent they not be killed.

Whatever they did do, they did when I was out of town for three weeks.

The husband and son don't know the details, and I have not bumped into
the wife, who is the only one who could be bothered with details in the
first place.

There have been far fewer bumblebees this summer, though there are some.

Recently I learned that bumblebees have unique qualities for pollinating squash
and relatives, only bumblebees' fuzziness can get the pollen out of the blossoms.
I am going to try to find ways to make them feel at home on my property.
Heather Y.

Well hopefully they weren't killed. I'm sure there are things you can do to make your property more bee friendly. Some plants are more attractive to bees than others.

I was at a friends house recently and her yard was abuzz with Bumblebees. She had planted Japanese anemone and I think she had one bee per bloom. It was a beautiful thing to see.

I like to watch the bees. I was watching this one bee the other week. He'd hover near a flower and watch another bee pollinate then he'd attack that bee when he went to fly away. This bee did it to all of them. There are even bullies in the bee world...LOL

Sounds like confused mating behavior. Same kind of bee as the ones he was attacking?

It looked the same to my untrained eye.