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Spencer Solves It takes on massive bee infestation

HARRIS COUNTY, Texas – Can you imagine having more than 300,000 bees swarming inside the ceiling of your own home, with only a couple of inches of ceiling tile protecting you and your family from being attacked?

Now, imagine you have been stuck with this problem for more than five years, and the bees just keep multiplying. This is exactly the problem that has been growing larger and larger everyday inside 88-year-old Dorothy Ritter’s home in Spring, in the Lexington Woods neighborhood.

For now, the bees are mostly quiet and living in the ceiling.

But, the piles and piles of dead bees lying by her windows and sprawled out on the carpeting clearly show how many bees are already invading and living inside Ritter’s home.

“Look at this, they are all over the place. Hundreds of dead bees and this is just what’s been collecting for the past three days,” Ritter said, looking at these dead insects lying on the floor of her dining room.

It’s so bad that Ritter has giant spots on her ceiling where honey from the bees is literally dripping through. And then there is that horrible, frightening, buzzing sound that happens at night.

”I can be eating dinner in the kitchen, and I can hear those bees buzzing. It’s horrible,” she said.

To make matters worse, Ritter lives all alone. She’s a widow and her loving husband Kenneth died in 2019. Now, she is on a fixed income and has not had the money to rid herself of this bee problem, which could run up to $5,000.

So, with nowhere else to turn, Ritter contacted me and The Spencer Solves It Team.

Now, after first donning a specially designed bee suit, I join one of the most experienced “bee hunters” in Houston, Claude Griffin of Gotcha Pest Control to fix Ritter’s growing problem. After examining the house and the holes where the bees are coming in and out, Claude told us the size of the problem.

“I believe there are at least 350,000 to 400,000 bees living inside Dorothy’s ceiling right now,” Griffin said.

He’s been cleaning out and eliminating massive bee infestations for more than 36 years now, and he has agreed to help us clean out Ritter’s massive problem absolutely free. We plan to go to work on the project in just a few days because this is a dangerous situation.

If the bees and their growing honeycombs should fall through the ceiling into Ritter’s living space, they could literally kill her, Griffin said.

“This is really dangerous. This is a coming to Jesus meeting type situation we have right here. This is a Texas cyclone of a beehive waiting to escape and come out. We got to get these bees out of here,” he said.

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About the Author
Bill Spencer headshot

Emmy-winning investigative reporter, insanely competitive tennis player, skier, weightlifter, crazy rock & roll drummer (John Bonham is my hero). Husband to Veronica and loving cat father to Bella and Meemo.

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