A Woman, Her Bedroom, and 35,000 Hidden Bees

There are a lot of pests in New York City to worry about, like roaches (which I had once, before I bought this roach gel, which killed them in such a way that when you woke up and went into the kitchen you would see them crawling ever so slowly to their deaths, which was immensely satisfying) and mice (which I also had once, though I think it was just one, which I killed with a mousetrap and it was pretty gross) and bedbugs (which I’ve never had and don’t even want to think about and don’t have a story for.)

But you don’t usually count honeybees among possible infestations. Cherisse Mulzac certainly didn’t. She had seen a few dead bees around her Brooklyn home over the last year, but that didn’t prepare her for what was developing above her bedroom ceiling.

As she started to notice more and more bees in the house this spring, she called Mickey Hegedus, a beekeeper, who tore open her ceiling on Wednesday. Inside he found a massive hive—around 35,000 strong, according to FOX5.

“It’s a beekeeper’s dream, really, to find a hive so healthy and functional inside the walls that I can then cut out and take home,” Hegedus told FOX5.

The beekeeper sucked them out with a low-pressure vacuum and took them to a hive in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Mulzac wasn’t left empty-handed though, as Hegedus gave her the hive’s honey, about 70 pounds of it. “It’s literally 100 percent all natural, probably better than the stuff you can get in the store,” Mulzac’s son Stuart told The New York Post.

Should you worry about bees if you live in New York? Probably not, though it has been an excellent spring for them. But if you see a few dead bees lying around the house, don’t wait too long to pick up the phone.