We currently have our second beehive-in-wall-cavity experience in session and are a bit jack of it.
Our house is cement brick and mortar and has maybe 8 expansion gaps that run bottom to top of the exterior walls… and this is where the bees are getting in. There are heaps of little holes all over the place where the previous owners mounted various things to the exterior.
So what I really want to do is seal (for pests, eventhuogh bees are awesome, i dont like hearing the walls buzz when i wake up) and paint (for looking nice). I’ve read about painting brick and am pretty sold on Keim mineral paint for enviro, service life, breathability and aesthetic reasons.
Questions to those who do building and painting and muralling.
If I fill the expansion joints with a non-flexible sealant will the house be ruined? Not sure concerned about ventilation, but for expansion am worried.
If I need to use a flexible sealant, are there any that mineral paints will adhere to?
Is applying this kind of paint harder than normal? Anyone got any experience with it?
Yeah, we got an apiarist out last time, he was a cool dude. Called him again last night, he reckons if they have jusst arrived and not been making any honeycomb yet, best bet is to call pest dude.
I dig bees as much/more than most, I guess… but when it comes to ripping your house apart to get em out, I gotta draw a line somewhere.
We had a similar problem at my mums place - rang the bee whisper who came around, took a few panels off to the wooden shed where they were, grabbed a fist full of bees and put them in a bee hive close by. Theory is that if he grabs the queen in that fist full of bees, then the other bees will follow.
It was really interesting to watch how the bees would migrate over to the hive. On their return they would land close to the entrance and beat their wings (is that the correct term?) to get the queens scent out to the incoming bees.
Yeah! same story for the first hive we had removed. Amazing to watch as they were tryingto get the queen into their transporto-hive… as soon as she was in, it was on for young, old, and everybee in between… they couldnt get in there fast enough. But yeah, apparently this time that isnt the way to go, i’m not really sure why. This dude had his teenage (I guess) daughter with him and she was killing it, too… then she was on the cover of canberra weekly a few weeks later as the face of the new-gen bee keepers.
Anyway, bees are always cool stories. And Aus is lucky ours are in relatively good nic! you know they have a bunch of sentinel hives around major ports to give early warning if bee disease comes in, I gather… bee pollination services are worth squillions
The expansion joints are there so the walls can move independently without cracking. You will need to use a flexible sealant otherwise it will just pull off from one side and create gaps. I think most silicones can be painted, but it never looks that great, better to find a silicone colour that matches. Remember to put a backing rod in behind the silicone.
Use sika-flex or bostik flex able sealant.
Both are paintable and available a at most hardwares, you can also get some brick colours so you won’t need to paint.
Before filling you can use a foam backfilling rod so you don’t use $100 in gap filler