My Right side woofer had a terrible buzz. Fixed it with a shop vac!

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Bill, try a few red chilies, the solid kind, heated over embers at the bottom of your chimney.
As I pointed out, it's a blocked chimney. There is no hearth at the bottom (was originally the bedroom fireplace). It's blocked very well now as, when they first moved in the old bees were falling down and managing to get into the bedroom. As you can imagine Wife (who was in hospital with a new baby at the time) freaked out. Bee man said they wouldn't last the winter but we had a risk of new occupants each year. the initial resealing of the hole wasn't enough to stop honey leaking in, so over the winter I stuck 2 cans of spray foam up there.

6 years on and there are bees every year. I wouldn't mind other than due to some freak accident both kids got stung a week apart when a bee landed in their hair. I think 100 acres of oilseed rape in flower had them a bit manic.

Of course being an old house we have solitary bees in the mortar (at least 3 types). It's not a garden, it's an ecosystem.

Oddly 8 identical farm cottages all with the same chimney arrangement in a row and only mine has visitors.
 
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Bill, two things...
One, a sting can be relieved by rubbing with an iron object like a screw driver. I have done it, works. Bee like insects inside the incoming electrical panel...

Two, they depend on smell to find the hive, so find out how they are entering and leaving, there has to be a gap.
Then spray or pump a strong smelling lingering liquid there.
I use old gear oil from my car in an oil can, a pesticide like Chlorpyriphos, which works on the fumigation principle, may work, but with children around, I would not use it in a dwelling.
A gifted perfume, not appreciated, may also work, as will shredded Neem leaves and raw tobacco.
 
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stung a week apart when a bee landed in their hair
It's a problem. The skin is sensitive and tight so the swelling from the sting causes more pain. The thing is to kill the bee not to try and free it. Basically, flatten it quick and sharp with the palm of your hand.

Always remember, when a bee stings you it leaves the poison sacks attached to the sting and the sting stays in because its barbed. Do NOT pinch it to remove it you just empty the sacks through the sting. Bare a fingernail and scrape it out.
 
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@StevenCrook problem is in both cases the little sod landed on their heads and burrowed under their hair. Finding it was then the challenge, esp with a 5 year old girl with hair down to her waist. They wear hats all the time in the garden now. We've put a protocol in place now where a pair of needlenose pliers are quick to grab in the shed so in case it happens again we can squish it rather than trying to release it as we were doing. The delay finding the poison sack on daughter meant her face swelled up 2 days later poor think. I've not been stung but last weekend they were being oddly aggressive and seemed to like the smell of the car polish so 3 of them chased me off car cleaning duty.

@NareshBrd picture attached of the hive entrance. Taken on cell phone but if you look closely you can see bees. It's over 10 metres up and would require a scaffold to get there safely or a cherry picker. I like bees, we need them to survive as a species, I just wish the odd ones wouldn't commit suicide on my family.
bees.jpg
 
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problem is in both cases the little sod landed on their heads and burrowed under their hair.
Yeah. It's a problem.

I'm surprised you've had trouble with them. Bees like straight lines and if the colony entrance is high up they're rarely a problem. It's why urban beekeepers like rooftops for their hives and when they're at ground level they surround them with a higher fence to drive the bees well above head height.

That said, with wild bees there a good chance they'll occasionally get very defensive depending on who the queen got to mate with, and it may mean that what the bees think of as close to the colony may stretch further than normal.

Have you had your daughter tested to see if she's allergic? EpiPen? My dad was very badly allergic to wasp stings. My mum got to be a dab hand at killing them by crushing them with her thumbnail. It was in the days before EpiPens....
 
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From the photo that looks like good strong colony :(

Smells. I know people who've had problems with aftershave, shampoo, etc. Bees can be triggered by it. I never worked my hives wearing perfumed anything. Noise too. If the colony is strong and they have lots of stores them they can be much more defensive.

You may have no alternative but to have them killed and the hole closed up if they continue like this. Hives generally requeen every two or three years. So their character may change for the better. But that's a swarm every two or three years. When a big colony swarms that could be 10-20k bees hurling out of your chimney looking for a new home. It's awe-inspiring to watch. They belt out of the exit like there's an air blower behind them and form up into an airborne ball 5-10m in diameter and then head off across the countryside to wherever the scout bees have identified as a new home.

There are reasons many beekeepers go to the expense of buying commercially bred queens and clip their wings. Docility is one. No swarms is another.
 
Try getting a paint sprayer or long distance water pistol, and spray a lingering smell at the area. Oil, dung, moth balls, incense sticks, whatever works to mask their own smell.
The car polish smell may have made them alert to something that triggered alarms in them.
Spray will disorient them, and they will be aggressive, take care to keep the girls indoors.
But in the long run, you need to get it done by a trained person.

I had a friend with rhesus monkeys ruining her flower beds, at my suggestion she put crackers in their tree, with incense sticks as the delayed action fuse. The fuse was wrapped around the incense stick, poor quality, no smell, and they would go off when nobody was around.
At my suggestion, she tied red chilies to exploding firework rockets and fired them up the tree.
They did not expect an attack like this, and the smell of exploding fireworks mixed with burnt chilies was not appreciated at all.

Scared them good and proper.
 
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Yeah. It's a problem.

I'm surprised you've had trouble with them. Bees like straight lines and if the colony entrance is high up they're rarely a problem.
Suprised me too, esp if you see what was at the back of the garden (excuse the lawn, kids large and small will destroy grass and we have moles). My working theory was these were bees that were on their way out so couldn't make it back to the hive and were looking for somewhere safe to land. Normally they land on the lawn and we learned a few years back not to go barefoot on the grass! 6 years now and this was the first problem. Just need to have a quick death protocol in place to deal with them if they land in hair again.


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surreal moment. posted here then went to drop sprogs at school and bumped into one of the dads in his bee keeping suit! He said he will come and take a look.
Good move. Goodluck.

Honeybee flight muscles don't work well when the temps drop below ~16c. In the spring you'll see them on plants, walls, anywhere there's sun trying to warm up. They use abdominal muscles to generate heat and you can see their abdomens 'pumping' while they're doing it.

There are always stragglers late to get back to the colony last thing, particularly if the weather has changed and it rained. But to have lots in the grass like that is really unusual. It's possible a load were ejected from the hive - it happens to drones in the autumn. It could also have been a failed swarm (called a cast) where a bunch of workers leave but the queen doesn't. Sometimes they just return to the colony (but red faced) other times they just disperse over several days because they need the queen to provide the focus for their activities.

Bees will also raid weaker colonies and steal their stores, there can be corpses close to the colony entrance, but, again, not normally all over the place. If there's a sick colony the bees will clear the corpses to outside the colony, occasionally sick bees leave and behave erratically, but from your photo, your colony looks STRONG.

I was never a large scale beekeeper, but had up to 9 colonies over a period of 15 years and while I had the occasional colony that was over defensive, I never had problems with bees in the grass and they were rarely troublesome even if you got quite close to the hive. The next door neighbour also had bees (it was how I got started) and I'd say the same about his.
 
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I'm going to move this over the the Lounge, since it has gone way off the subject of speakers. It was kinda Loungey anyway. ;)

My speaker bees are all gone as of yesterday morning. When we cleaned out the hive, a few hundred (or maybe 1000) escaped and later came back to cluster on the speaker. They simply would no go away. So Saturday we placed a small empty hive on top of the speaker and strapped it down, as there is a lot of fott traffic under the speaker. By golly it worked! Not 10 seconds after the hive was placed, they made a bee-line for it, it was amazing to watch. There were still quite a few clustered on the speaker Saturday night, but by 7AM Monday morning, they had all moved into the hive, every last one of them.

The beekeeper retrieved the hive and bees went off to join their sisters in a new location. Life is Bee-u-tifull.
 
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I hope you are awarded a large jar of fresh pure honey
There's a big difference between commercial and specialist beekeeper honey. But it varies a lot year to year. Some years my bees found early spring flowers or lime trees and the honey was exquisite. Provided you keep the lid airtight and it's somewhere cool, honey is practically immortal. So buy plenty of jars of some you like and lay it down like a fine wine.
 
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There's a big difference between commercial and specialist beekeeper honey. But it varies a lot year to year. Some years my bees found early spring flowers or lime trees and the honey was exquisite. Provided you keep the lid airtight and it's somewhere cool, honey is practically immortal. So buy plenty of jars of some you like and lay it down like a fine wine.
I bee-friended a honey farmer in the heart of farming country Ontario. He collects alfalfa honey to a wide array of berry honey and every thing in between.

I cook with it or even eat it straight from the jar. Anyone who's conscious of keeping nutrition in check check out the benefits of pure honey and pollen. Its the bees-knees.