When Susan Connor came home for lunch one afternoon last summer and heard humming, it didn't take long for her to realize it wasn't coming from the fridge.

Connor went outside and saw a large swarm of bees hovering around the exterior of the wall on the second floor. That meant one thing ­ – a hive had gotten into the wall…again.

When Connor and her husband, Casey, purchased their Front Street house 29 years ago, it came with a hive of bees that they had exterminated.

This time around, Connor wanted to make sure the bees stayed alive to buzz another day – just not in her walls.

She called a friend who owns a cranberry bog and was eager to have hearty New England bees help with pollination. The bog owner, who asked not to be named, tried to lure the bees out by placing a hive on the porch roof. The bees weren’t biting.

“We decided to wait until the winter because we really didn’t want to kill the bees because, as you know they’re in trouble,” said Connor, whose small farm has a host of animals.

Connor couldn’t be sure how long the bees had been in the wall, but when she and her husband cut a hole in the horsehair plaster on the second floor, they could see bees and honeycomb.

Connor’s cranberry bog friend came back in February to extract the bees. Using a shop vacuum set on low, he gently sucked the bees out of the wall and into a box.

“He was able to slowly vacuum them out. You have to adjust the power of the vacuum so you don’t hurt the bees,” said Connor. “He estimated there were around 10,000 bees.”

Once the bees were removed, Connor and her husband had the sticky task of removing the honeycomb inside the wall.

“We read on the Internet that they can detect the old honeycomb and will continue to come back,” said Connor. “Hopefully we got the smell out. There was wax all over the walls and honey. It was really messy.”

Connor said they pulled out five pieces of comb that were approximately four feet long and seven inches wide.

Since the bees had been living off the honey for the winter, Connor said there wasn’t a lot left to harvest. Connor did manage to salvage some honey from the wall.

“And it was delicious,” she said.

Honeybee infestations are not uncommon, and Connor wants people who finds themselves in a similar situation to consider saving the bees rather than exterminating them.

Inexplicable colony collapses have been a concern and a subject of debate for several years and Connor wanted to do her part to preserve the pollinators.

“I just hope that more people will be aware that we really need to protect things like bees and bats,” she said.