50,000 honeybees found inside Kitchener home

An estimated 50,000 honeybees were removed from a home in Kitchener, after homeowners noticed a swarm of bees gathering along their guestroom wall.

 "We saw bees going in an out of the eavestrough and we wondered what was going on," said Carol Stewart, the owner of the house.

When the clouds of bees around the house grew, Stewart decided to call an exterminator. But the exterminators said they would lose their licence for killing honeybees, so Stewart had to get creative.

That's when she read an article about beekeeper David Schuit and decided he was the man for the job. 

"We had to court him all winter because at that point we were desperate," Stewart said. 

The hive stretched between two walls of Stewart's home, taking up the space between the drywall and the outer wall of the house. 

Schuit, with the help of his 19-year-old son, demolished the wall to access the bees and preserve as much of the hive as possible. 

He has removed beehives from residential areas twice before and thinks the bees are gravitating toward urban areas because they are further from the neonicotinoids used on many farms in the surrounding area. 

"I'm coming to the point where I think the urban areas are a friendlier place for the bees to live," Schuit said. 

He managed to remove the thousands of bees, including a queen bee, which he will add to the hives he manages for his business, Saugeen Country Honey Inc. 

Stewart was shocked when she finally caught a glimpse of her houseguests. 

"I was expecting a nice little honeybee comb like Winnie-the-Pooh. Nothing prepared me for what I saw," said Stewart.