Hey landlord:  here's something that real estate investing courses don't mention...

It’s honey bee season here in Houston. If your'e a real estate investor in a  bee-prone city then you’ll know what I’m talking about.  Or you will soon.

Every colony has a queen, who rules the roost. Every now and again she’ll get a wild hair and decide to relocate. And it seems, for whatever reason, that Houston honeybee queens like to relocate to rental properties that I own. Go figure.

Getting rid of a hive is a three step process. First, you have to kill the bees. Second, you have to extract the hive, and third you have to seal up the house – caulking whatever cracks the bees were using to get into the structure. If you skip a step that’s ok, it just means that you’ll get to repeat the whole process the following year because the bees will come back.

Here’s something that I’ve found out: a lot of landlords ‘round here do this on the cheap, which means that I buy a nice bee-free property only to find that an infestation pops up when summer arrives and a colony returns that had been there the previous year. I got a call just this week about one of my single family homes in Katy, a Houston suburb. I met the bee guy out there and we took care of it this afternoon. (note: you have to get yourself a “bee guy”…when you’re calling around for exterminators you’re just as likely as not to get the response “oh we don’t do bees.”) This was a quick job and relatively cheap.

I wasn’t so lucky last year when a colony took up residence in the siding of a townhouse that I own. Seems these guys were returning to a large honeycomb that had been left a year or two back, and the guy had to do a significant amount of work to get the whole thing out.

sidenote: a second drawback to not extracting the hive is a rotting honeycomb which a) stinks and b) will attract every raccoon, rat, and miscellaneous critter for miles.  Not good.

So when you’re buying ask the sellers if they’ve ever had a bee problem. If so go check it out, and even if there’s not a bee in sight make sure you caulk up the crime scene, otherwise you’re gonna get to deal with it later.

I always love talking to exterminators; maybe I just attract exterminators with good attitudes, but in my experience they tend to be enthusiastic about their jobs and love what they do.  The guy that came out today told me that in the past you would be able to get a beekeeper to come out and instead of killing the bees they'd extract the hive for free.  They'd  they'd collect the comb, the queen, and as many bees as they could gather up and transport the whole lot out to the farm to produce honey.  But nowadays with aggressive Africanized bees popping up they're nervous about harvesting wild colonies and introducing them to thier farms.  So much for that angle...