North Penn High School has been buzzing—literally. Up to 60,000 bees have been living inside the walls of the school and are now set to be removed. NBC10’s Johnny Archer spoke with the beekeeper tasked with removing the hive.
A local high school is buzzing.
A swarm of honey bees took over two classrooms inside a Montgomery County high school forcing students to relocate from the rooms.
Officials with North Penn High School in Montgomery County told NBC10 that the honey bees were found in two classrooms on Aug. 26.
During a school board meeting, officials said that about 10,000 bees were in the classrooms.
Get top local stories in Philly delivered to you every morning. >Sign up for NBC Philadelphia's News Headlines newsletter.
"We always get one or two bees or one or two wasps in a classroom at a time but this was unprecedented. When you were standing inside the room prior to removing all the bees in the room you could just hear all the bees buzzing. It sounded like a beehive. So very interesting," director of facilities and operations Tom Scheider explained in the meeting.
The bees are thought to have entered the walls of the high school through what officials called "exterior weep holes" before building a hive.
"This was a pretty large colony. We are getting a substantial heat signature through that brick. Fortunately, we are able to find exactly where those bees are and then adjust our removal process accordingly," Craig McCorkle with Liberty Bell Beekeepers said.
Local
Breaking news and the stories that matter to your neighborhood.
McCorkle has been tasked with removing the beehive. He estimates that there are more than 50,000 honey bees in a hive about the size of a large cooler inside the school's walls.
Officials said that they believe the queen bee is in the hive that's located between the block wall and the brick with up to 60,000 other bees.
"We are going to have to cut open the brick and remove the brick," McCorkle said. "We use a safe collection vacuum to gather all the bees and then we remove the comb, the honey and any by product that [is] inside of the space. We are going to fill that space to prevent any bees from coming back."
Officials said that the bees that were found in the classrooms were removed, but eventually returned to one of the rooms. The class assigned to the room was temporarily relocated.
The hive is scheduled to be removed from the school on Friday, Aug. 30. McCorkle says the process will take at least six hours.
He plans to take the bees back to his facility in Tacony where they will live on.
