See the work up close.

Every clip here is a real job, filmed on site, and together they cover the range of places a honey bee colony will settle in Central Texas. Some are the situations people expect — a wall cavity, a soffit, a chimney, a hollow oak. Others surprise homeowners every time: a compost bin, a terra-cotta pot, an abandoned couch, a trash can at an apartment complex, an owl house, even the top of a thirteen-floor building in downtown Austin. If bees can find a dry, shaded cavity of roughly the right size, they will consider it, and that is why identifying the exact location of the comb matters more than guessing from the entry point.

Watch a few and a pattern emerges. We open only the section needed to reach the comb, lift the comb out in sheets where the structure allows, and vacuum the bees gently into a transport box rather than treating them. The colony then goes to our apiary and gets re-hived. Nothing in these videos involves poison, which is the whole point — a sprayed colony leaves behind melting comb and stored honey inside your wall, and that is what draws ants, beetles, and staining for months afterward.

A few clips show stinging insects that are not honey bees at all. The southern yellow jacket footage is a good illustration of why species identification comes first: ground-nesting yellow jackets and honey bees call for completely different approaches. If you are trying to work out what you have, compare what you are seeing against our honey bee removal and yellow jacket and hornet removal pages, or just send us a photo and we will tell you.