A peaceful Saturday morning in Aledo was disturbed when a swarm of about 200,000 bees came swarming from the walls of a home.
Krysta Mullins said she was still sleeping when her 9-year-old daughter came to wake her, telling her the dogs were crying on the upstairs balcony. When she went to check on them, she hardly had time to realize what the problem was before she was sent looking for an escape.
"As soon as I opened the door I got stung in my eye, so I just covered up with my jacket and took off running," Mullins said.
While one dog jumped to the ground below, Mullins said the other went running through the house, bringing the swarm inside.
"I was covered in them," Mullins said.
Mullins said the entire family took off in different directions, running down the street and stripping items of clothes, hoping they could eventually outrun the bees.
Two doors down, John Lombardy said he and his wife were enjoying their morning coffee when the swarm approached.
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"Just the noise … It just sounded like a whole swarm of bees was coming at you with no remorse. They were on a mission," Lombardy said.
He said within seconds bees swarmed both the front door and the couple's cars, leaving them scrambling for a place to get away.
"I don't know what kind of breed or strain these were, but it wasn't … it wasn't a good kind that's for sure," Lombardy said.
Though 911 was called, Mullins said they weren't able to immediately get close to the house. A neighbor called Randall Kennedy of DFW Wildlife Control to help.
"It was so many. It was a little cloud of them," Kennedy said.
In total, Kennedy guessed there were as many as 200,000 bees swarming the street. He guessed they'd been building their hive for three years right in between Mullins' home's walls.
"I've done a lot of beehives and I've only seen a few that were this angry," Kennedy said.
He said most bee species are more aggressive than they once were thanks to cross breeding with Africanized bees.
Over the course of a couple of hours, Kennedy was able to vacuum most of them up. Though without cutting into the wall, he said they'll be impossible to completely remove.
No one was seriously injured, but Mullins said her family spent most of the day removing dozens of stingers from both them and one of their dogs. They're still searching for their other dog that leaped from the balcony amidst the chaos.
Kennedy said those dealing with their own bee problems should always reach out to wildlife experts rather than pest control to have the bees removed rather than simply being sprayed.
