Do It Yourself and Other Educational Chimney and Fire Safety Articles

Let’s start out by agreeing that bees are good!  Bees are responsible for pollinating one in three bites of food we eat.  They also supply us with delicious honey and honeycomb.  They are extremely vital to our ecosystem and we take their lives seriously. 

When bees are deciding on a new home for their hive, they send out scouting groups of worker bees, who are all female, to observe new locations.  If they decide that your chimney is the right place to settle down, you may start to notice them flying around the flue or some can enter your house and you will see them near windows trying to escape from the room where your fireplace is located.  The ones in your house are scout bees that were inspecting your chimney and wandered too far down the flue and got lost inside. To get rid of scouts, before they go back and tell the rest of the colony that your chimney is a perfect new home, you should get up on the roof and spray bee repellent around the top of the chimney.  It will not kill them but it will deter them from choosing your location for their hive, and they will move on and look elsewhere.

If the bees have already moved in and created their hive inside your chimney, DO NOT LIGHT A FIRE to try to kill them or get them to leave.  A fire will not make them leave and the heat will cause the honey to melt down the chimney and create a giant mess of honey and soot that is difficult to clean.  Worst case, the hive will collapse into the fireplace or on your smoke shelf and because you need to have the damper open to light your fire, you’ll get a house full of distressed bees that track soot everywhere they touch!  Another issue is that the hive may be between the flue and the side of your chimney, and the fire will melt honey that is very difficult to clean and the smell will attract future bees for years to come.

To remove the hive, you have to locate it first.  If you can see it inside the flue, that part is easy.  If not, you will have to listen for buzzing through the chimney (a stethoscope will be handy here) and then drill a hole large enough to extract the bees.  If you want to preserve the bees, contact a beekeeper who can carefully remove the comb and take the bees to relocate.  If you are not preserving the bees, you can use a shop-vac to suck them up or an insecticide to kill them.  Make sure you wear a full bodied protective bee suit when doing this as you will put the bees on defense and they will sting.  Once the bees are eliminated, you can remove the hive.  Make sure you completely remove everything because any remnants will leave a scent that will attract bees in the future.

Repair work is often involved with beehive removal so if you are uncomfortable with destroying part of your chimney flue or concerned about repairing the chimney properly to meet safety codes after the bees are removed, you will want to call a professional chimney sweep to come and handle your bee problem from beginning to end.