Bees swarm Houston neighborhood

02:18 PM CDT on Sunday, July 24, 2005

By Wendell Edwards / 11 News

Click to watch video

Families within a half-mile radius were told to stay inside their homes on Saturday, after tens of thousands of bees were found nesting inside a Houston home.

A mix of Africanized killer bees and honey bees forced authorities to issue a shelter in place, confining residents to their homes for about three hours. Africanized honey bees are more aggressive, swarm more often and attack in larger groups.

With an ambulance and a fire truck standing by and deputies blocking both ends to the 6800 block of Marisol, all homeowner Solomon Mugoswa could do was watch from afar.

Mugoswa had called pest control agents for a routine visit to remove the bees from his house, but thousands began swarming through the neighborhood.

"I was watching them, thinking, 'Where are they going to go?'" he said. "They kept going in and out of cars and up and down the street. They went from one block to the next. They split up and started hitting the neighborhood hone after another."

Neighbor Tony Clausen was stung on his hands.

"I saw that the swarm was getting bigger," he said. "I started in the house, and they [caught me] on the way into the house."

Beekeepers pulled several thick honeycombs out of the side of Mugoswa's house. The combs produced more than 160 pounds of pure honey -- enough to feed about 80,000 bees.

"The cones were 6-inches thick," said beekeeper Claude Griffin. "They had been there for so long. It was unbelievable."

Griffin believes the bees had been in Mugoswa's house for at least two years.