my favorite fun fact about bees and bee nests, is that they actually produce a lot of heat, so if you have a nest of bees in your wall, you can tell because your wall will be hot.
Had something similar. My bedroom was small and under the roof, and for some time I heard scratching noises at night over my bed. I assumed that were mice, so I set up some mouse traps in the attic. No success. The bait was gone, but none of the traps were sprung.
So, one evening when the noise got annoying, I went to investigate closely. And found a large wasps nests, right on the other side of the sheet rock of my bedroom.
I have a drone on offer up and some fool tried to convince me to trade for a flame thrower. Wtf am I going to do with a flame thrower? I guess I could vanquish my enemies… If I had any. People are weird.
Jesus. That sounds eerily like my experience. Heard scracthes in the attic and thought it was mice. Woke up one morning with a dead wasp in the bed and having been stung. Thought nothing of it. Woke up a few days later with two dead wasps in the bed and having been stung. Huh, that’s weird. Then when I woke up one morning I saw a wasp crawl between the planks in the ceiling. Called exterminators and they sprayed the attic. The wasps had built their nest in the isolation and had chewed through it down to the planks… The next week I had hundreds of dead (and a few alive) bees in the room every day and I had to sleep on the sofa…
When I was very little, maybe 2, my mum had sat me down in front of Sesame Street while she did some chores. Not long after I came running into the kitchen “mummy mummy there’s a birdie in the front room!” She said yes, that was big bird and to go back in and watch it. I kept running back to her increasingly more upset about the birdie until she came into the living room to find a pigeon had come down the chimney and was irately trying to escape. I know I was too young to remember it, but I swear I can recall the feeling of vindication!
It’s not that uncommon. When a beehive is doing really well, it’ll “split”, meaning they’ll raise a second queen and the new queen will leave and half of the colony will go with her to establish a new hive somewhere. This is called swarming, and it’s the their version of reproduction. (Tangent: Contrary to popular belief, honey bee swarms are usually very docile since they don’t yet have a home to defend.) Once they find a suitable location to settle, they’ll move in. Without humans building things, a suitable location would usually be something like an old hollowed out tree. But humans build great beehive homes. Old houses with small openings between siding panels that allow bees into the walls are a common favorite.
Shoutout to the absolutely fantastic pen&paper RPG “Heart” in which one of the classes is the Deep Apiarist. Including the ability to have the bees crawling through your body that doubles as their hive animate it while you sleep, allowing you more active hours a day.
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