A couple from Nebraska discovered that they had around 6,000 bees living in the walls of their 100-year-old house and decided to save them rather than exterminate them.

Thomas and Marylu Gouttierre noticed there was an influx of bees flying around in their house after planting flowers that attract bees outside. The bees were flying around their kitchen, and about 30 were in one bedroom, which was when the couple realized there was a problem.

“If you put your ears to the wall you could hear the buzzing,” Thomas Gouttierre, who is a retired dean at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, told the Omaha World-Herald on Sunday.

The couple immediately thought to call an exterminator, but after some research, they decided that it was actually important to keep them alive.

“We’ve been reading and there are a lot of great shows on PBS ‘Nature’ about how important bees are to pollinating the world in which we live,” Thomas Gouttierre said.

There is an option to have a bee handler come out and safely collect the bees out of the inhabited area. They then relocate the bees to an area where they are welcomed. This can be a better option than exterminating them due to the bee population being threatened over the past decade.

The couple said that the bee handling service cost them $600 and that they also removed all of the built-up honeycomb in their walls.

“I think in the long run, it’s made us appreciate all the more the value of bees and the importance of them to the process of pollination and all the things insects may do to help us eat,” Thomas Gouttierre said.

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