Hornet horror turns into sweet honeybee discovery north of Edmonton

Just call Debbie Mansfield-Stahn a bee-liever.

What she thought was a hornets’ nest when she discovered evidence of insects on her property north of Edmonton last year turned out to be a colony of about 50,000 honeybees.

It started more than a year ago, when Mansfield-Stahn first saw them around the back of a garage.

“I'm not gonna lie, I thought they were hornets, so I just didn't go back there,” said Mansfield-Stahn, who lives east of Cardiff, about 20 km north of the city.

She avoided them until one day, she saw a huge number of them accessing the heated garage around an exhaust pipe and decided to seek advice, taking video of the bees and posting it on Facebook.

Local amateur beekeeper Jean-Charles Poirier answered her, telling her the insects were honeybees and that she wouldn’t want to try to move them until next year.

“He said, ‘Those are honeybees, so you don't want to move them this fall because they won't have enough time to rebuild their hive for winter because they have to build it and then they have to protect their queen, so I left them,” said Mansfield-Stahn.

This spring and into the summer, all was quiet around the shed until June 29, when garage bee activity resumed.

"The Thursday before the July long weekend, my daughter came into the house and said, ‘Mom, the bees are back,’" she said.

Another video, another message to Poirier. On July 4, he came out to their acreage.

That’s when the fun began.

Poirier, an electrician by trade who got into beekeeping over the pandemic, donned protective clothing and brought special suits for Mansfield-Stahn and her daughter to wear, too, while observing him extract the bees from a wall.

“"She was pretty excited by the whole thing,” Poirier said, recalling the extraction. “She actively participated in that she got right close to the comb, didn't touch anything. Her daughter sat 20 feet away and filmed it from a distance and was happy with that."

It took five hours for Poirier to complete the task: an hour of preparation and cutting the wall followed by four hours of bee extraction.

“(The bees) were really calm at first. As we started getting deeper into the combs, then they were getting mad,” said Mansfield-Stahn. “I think he finished with 20-plus stings.”

Poirier called the experience “flawless,” from cutting open the wall to carefully using a vacuum to extract the bees.

“It couldn’t have gone any better,” he said.

He took the bees home to his west Edmonton backyard, where they’re now neighbours with his two permanent hives.

"I've found myself very much in awe of what they're capable of, and impressed,” Poirier said of honeybees. “It's a super organism, no individual can live by itself. They all fail without the team. There are all sorts of lessons."

With files from CTV News Edmonton's Jeremy Thompson and Dave Mitchell