Couple Keep 10,000 Pet Bees in High-Rise Apartment

For over a year a couple angered their neighbors by keeping around 10,000 bees in the balcony of their high-rise apartment in the Chinese city of Ningbo.

Police were recently called to a residential building in the coastal city of Ningbo after a couple living there ignored numerous complaints from their neighbors about the thousands of pet bees they kept on their balcony. About a year ago, the unnamed couple installed a small beehive in their high-rise apartment with the intention of using them for “bee sting treatment”, a form of alternative medicine believed to help alleviate the symptoms of painful conditions like rheumatoid arthritis. However, the insects kept breeding and their number swelled to around 10,000, becoming a nuisance to the other residents.

Neighbors started complaining about the bees swarming outside their windows on sunny days and staining clothes left out to dry with their droppings. Property management complained to the couple several times about the bee situation, but they refused to move their pets, so on March 29th police were called to set things right.

“To other residents in the complex, this is a ticking bomb. What happens if someone gets stung, have you thought about that?” a police officer told the wife, but she apparently didn’t think being stung by a bee was a big deal.

“Being stung is not a big deal. I’ve been stung a few times, and nothing happened,” the woman reportedly told the officer. “We have grown attached to these bees, we don’t want to move them.”

Although the couple reportedly regarded the bees as pets, they eventually agreed to move them out of the apartment after being threatened with a fine of between 200 and 500 yuan ($30 and $74).

The couple was criticized on social media, with most users accusing them of being selfish and ignorant for disregarding their neighbors’ well-being. “You can even keep dinosaurs if you want, but only on the condition you do not affect other people,” one person commented.

Personally, I think the strangest thing about this story is that other residents complained about the bee droppings staining their clothes and not the danger of getting stung.

This isn’t the first time we’ve written about people sharing their home with bees. Back in 2017, we featured another Chinese family that had a giant open beehive in their living room for 12 years because feng-shui experts told them to keep it for good fortune.