Glynda Malleske and her neighbor used the lord’s name when they saw the palace a queen bee and her court had erected on the side of her house in the Village of the Hills.

A truly royal visit it was not.
The intrusive insects had established a bee beachhead by building a hive about 2 feet by 2 feet by her chimney’s exterior that also crept into her attic’s soffit. The queen bee was laying 4,000-6,000 eggs a day.
The day Malleske saw the bees while she and her neighbor were discussing a tree hanging over into her yard was the same day she had read about Willard Duncan, the 85-year-old man who was stung more than 500 times in a bee attack Aug. 11 in East Austin. Duncan was hospitalized after the bees stung him in front of a home near Waller and 13th streets.
“I’m so glad we just happened to see the hive. I would have never considered looking for anything [there],” Malleske said.
So she and her husband were on full alert and called in the cavalry in the form of Keith’s Bee Service, an Austin-area bee relocation service.
Beekeeper Keith Huddle estimated the bees had been there at least two months and produced a hive capable of holding up to four gallons of honey.
Rather than exterminate bees, bee relocators move the hive’s brood chambers, honeycombs and bees to a bee farm where they are rehabilitated in a new environment and bred to be less hostile.
All bees found in nature in the U.S. are Africanized hybrids, and hives have varying temperaments based on their queens’ pheromone output, Huddle said.
The hive at Malleske’s house was relatively docile as Huddle and his assistant, Eric Cummings, extracted about 100,000 bees in a couple of hours using a vacuum.
“They weren’t really super, super aggressive like I’ve seen them. When I run across a hive as calm as this one, it’s nice because I can breathe through the whole [extraction], “ Huddle said.
Things can get sticky if the queen pours on the pheromones and directs her drones to attack, en masse, the job turns into a battle. More Africanized bees display more aggressive tendencies, Huddle said.
“I’ve been at a hive vacuuming it where it gets … so aggressive. There are so many bees flying in the area and there’s so many on my hood that I can’t see through them and I just have to vacuum them off my face,” he said. “When they start covering your mask it’s quite overwhelming and unnerving because any flaw in that mask will be found.”
The beekeepers’ protective suits and gloves ward off the bees, but the stifling Texas heat and hostile swarms can create a pressure-cooker.
However, when an unprotected victim gets stung five or six times, the pheromone that exudes off the bee sting, attracts more bees like a magnet to the area of skin that was stung.
“All of a sudden — boom — they are mad and they are lighting out a 1,000 a second on you. One sting becomes 10 becomes 100 becomes several hundred that fast,” Huddle said with a snap of his fingers.
Swarming season starts late March or early April and ends in September.
In spring, bees start to reproduce in numbers when their pollen sources start flowering and budding. When a hive amasses more bees than it can hold, a group of about 20,000 to 30,000 bees will form, make a new queen and leave to build a new hive, he said.
They must act quickly to restore their food source, so they operate on a deadline of about 24-48 hours to set up the initial workings of a hive.
Huddle warned that a hive that acts calmly one day could turn vicious the next day if a new queen moves in that has more Africanized instincts and kills the old queen.
“When the new queen arrives, there’s a new commander instantly. New decisions are being made, and you just never know what that’s going to bring,” he said.
The service has received about five to 10 calls a month to relocate bees from trees and residences in Lakeway, Bee Cave, Steiner Ranch and western Travis County this summer with some churches and cities requesting help.
Huddle said his service had responded to about 10 relocation calls in two weeks off Texas 71 in Bee Cave.
Malleske said she was relieved that she found the hive at her house before anyone was attacked.
“Everybody needs to check their own property,” she said.