Honeybees invaded a reporter’s home, and upended everything she thought she knew about them

Sarah Kliff, a New York Times reporter, was working from home in Washington, D.C., a few weeks back, when she found a bee buzzing in her window.

“I thought it had just gotten in by accident. When I went to get it, I saw another bee,” Kliff told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

“Then when I went to my kid’s room, there’s this loud droning noise in the wall. And that’s when it kind of dawned on me that I was dealing with not just a handful of bees, but many, many bees.”

The interlopers turned out to be honeybees who had come through a gap in her roof and infested her attic. And, as she details in the Times, nobody would help her get rid of them.

Exterminators wouldn’t lay a finger on the insects. Beekeepers declined to take them off her hands. Meanwhile, her neighbours were begging her to save the bees.

Kliff was worried about bee conservation too, she says. But when she started digging into it, she discovered something that shocked her — honeybees don’t need our protection.

Honeybees are not going anywhere

Honeybees are perhaps the bee most people are familiar with, but in North America, they’re an invasive and managed species.

Brought over by European settlers in the 17th century, they are used partly for honey production, but mostly for agriculture pollination.

There were 794,341 honeybee colonies in Canada in 2023, according to Statistics Canada, up 3.6 per cent from a year earlier.

And while their colonies are sometimes plagued by mass deaths, often due to pests and diseases, they’re not at risk of extinction.

“This is a livestock pollinator. So this right away negates any endangerment risk, because we’re producing them in mass numbers to pollinate crops,” Gail MacInnis, a Quebec entomologist, told CBC.

The bees that are at risk in Canada, she says, are the more than 800 native species. And like most insects, she says wild bees are in decline worldwide.

In fact, the proliferation of honeybees through urban beekeeping may be putting native species at risk, as they compete for limited resources — namely, flowers.

A 2023 study led by MacInnis, a former postdoctoral researcher at Concordia University, found that as honeybee populations rose in the city, local bee populations declined. Similar studies in Paris and other cities also found fewer wild bees in areas with more beehives.

A waggle away from a full-blown swarm

Nevertheless, when Kliff called an exterminator, she was told it’s illegal to spray honeybees in D.C. In fact, she learned that 30 states have similar laws to protect pollinators.

In Canada, there are federal laws restricting pesticide use to protect pollinators, but MacInnis says she’s not aware of any rules preventing honeybee extermination.

That said, she says beekeeping groups in Canada and the U.S. are usually happy to relocate honeybees from people’s homes without killing them.

“They’re getting a product,” she said. “They’re getting a free swarm that they can take back and put into a box, then they can take care of the bees and get the honey out of it.”

But in Kliff’s case, she didn’t have enough bees — yet.

Honeybees live in massive colonies of tens of thousands of workers and one queen. And when they run out of space, they generate a new queen and split into two groups.

“The old queen takes half of the workers and flies off and lands on a tree somewhere,” Zayed said. “Then they send in scouts to explore the surrounding area.”

When the scouts find a potential new home, he says they return to the swarm and “do a little waggle dance” to tell their fellow bees about it.

Urban honeybee hives are a problem, research suggests

New research from Concordia University suggests the explosion of urban honeybee hives is having a negative impact on the wild bee population. CBC Montreal’s Debra Arbec speaks with the study’s lead author Gail MacInnis.

Kliff believes it was scouts that infested her home.

So she sealed the bees in her attic and, with beekeepers’ approval, used a vacuum to hoover up the ones that had already meandered into other parts of her home.

The idea, she says, was to make sure no bees returned to their swarm to waggle. And it appears to have worked, she said.

“The swarm never showed. By evening, fewer bees were roaming around the house, and the attic buzzing had grown softer,” she wrote in the Times.

“The next morning, my son discovered dead bees in his playroom, and the dog ate some carcasses on the floor. Thirty-six hours after the honeybees had arrived, they were gone.”

MacInnis says Kliff was a victim of “misinformation surrounding honeybees.”

It was misinformation that Kliff, herself, had fallen prey to — in part because of a spate of panicked news stories a decade ago about honeybees’ pending demise, many of which have since been walked back as new data came to light.

“I’d been under the impression, like a lot of my neighbours, a lot of my friends, that, you know, the honeybee population was in the middle of rapid decline, that they really needed a lot of protection,” she said.

“It was really surprising to me to learn that the honeybees are pretty much doing fine.”