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Buzz Kill - Page 1 |
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While we worry about killer bees invading Georgia, the real danger is the disappearance of honeybees—and with them, our food supply. |
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By KIMBERLY TURNER |
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At 7:30 a.m. on a flawless April day, bee removalist Mike Sorensen is already in his truck, fending off phone calls. (Ring. “We can get out there to remove them, but it won’t be this week.” Ring. “I’m your nearest beekeeper, but I can’t help until after about six o’clock.”) Beside him, his son Cody squints at MapQuest directions to
an address in Hampton.
Looking up, Cody spots the house. “Oh nooooo, it’s stucco,” he moans. Removing bees is one thing; some might even say the easy thing. The other is putting the house back together. When stucco must be cut to locate a hive, the situation gets complicated. To minimize damage, removalists use stethoscopes, heat guns, stud finders, or snake cameras to find bees inside walls, eaves, or hidden cavities. At this home, though, no equipment is needed. Homeowner Melinda Davenport gestures to a second-story window at the rear of her house. “There they are,” she announces.
She and her husband, Joey, first noticed a buzzing sound emanating from their teenage son’s bedroom several years ago. Outside, the flight pattern of winged workers confirmed their suspicions: They were sharing their house with a hive of bees. Joey, a forty-six-year-old Coca-Cola route driver, created a makeshift beekeeper veil by duct-taping window screen onto an Atlanta Braves cap, then donned protective gloves, grabbed bug spray, and climbed a ladder to do battle. For every bee he managed to exterminate, several more emerged. And they weren’t pleased.
At the time, Joey had no way of knowing that 80,000 to 90,000 bees had taken up residence above his son’s room. That’s one hell of a lot of cans of Raid.
Georgia is a fine place to be a bee in April. The tulip poplars are in bloom, pollen is abundant, and the days are warm. So when the removalist team arrives, the Davenports’ honeybees are lively, manic even, zipping in and out of the hive at a solid fifteen miles per hour.
Cody, a tall clean-cut blond four days shy of eighteen, carefully erects two thirty-two-foot ladders while his dad suits up. The younger Sorensen’s yes sir/no sir respectfulness toward his father demolishes the stereotype of the smart-ass teen. On the other side of the house, Mike reciprocates, repeating phrases such as “Cody’s a hard worker,” “Cody’s a natural-born beekeeper,” and “Cody makes me proud.” He finishes putting on his protective gear, zips his veiled hat to the collar, and climbs to the roof. Using a crowbar, he gently lifts a section of roofing.
Bees pour from the opening. Their fuzzy bodies engulf Sorensen’s veiled head. Their buzzing increases in urgency, growing louder and more demanding until the air seems to vibrate. It’s the sound of 80,000 sets of wings, each flapping 11,400 times a minute; a sound you’d swear was coming from both inside and outside of your head. It is, in a word, terrifying.
And yet, you can’t blame these bees. They have built a hive about six feet long and three to four feet deep, equivalent to building, say, Turner Field . . . by yourself . . . with rudimentary tools. The hive structure is made of hexagonal cells of beeswax designed to support twenty-five times their own weight. To make one pound of beeswax, workers need to use about eight pounds of honey. To make one pound of honey, forager bees have to fly about 55,000 miles to collect nectar from about 2 million flowers. The average bee makes just half a teaspoon in her entire lifetime.
You can understand their irritation.
The Sorensens’ plan is not to exterminate the bees. The plan is to suck them into traps, Ghostbusters style, then take them to a farm where they’re wanted for pollination or honey production. Mike and Cody begin cutting away comb from under the roof, separating it into two bins, one for comb with brood (developing bees), which they’ll keep, and another for comb without, which they’ll discard. As they move farther into the hive, the comb gets more and more gooey—swollen with honey and nectar and pollen. They’re making good progress until a roofing nail catches on Mike’s bee suit, tearing a hole near his chest. Seeing their opportunity to attack the large mammal invading their hive, the bees rush in. As Mike descends from the roof, they begin to sting.
Mike stands next to the truck, calm but flinching with every sting, as Cody tries unsuccessfully to patch his dad’s suit with duct tape. “There are about thirty or so in here with me now,” Mike tells the homeowners, whose curiosity has drawn them to the front door. “But they can only sting me once. And they’re almost done.” The forced cheerfulness in his voice is tinged with an edge of discomfort. Cody leaves to fetch a replacement suit for his dad from their headquarters at Bee-Yond Wonderful in McDonough.
By now, the commotion has drawn neighborhood rubberneckers. The curiosity is typical. Once, Mike went to an Austell home to find a massive hive had filled the wall cavity facing the road. “It was like a drive-in movie,” he says. “People were literally parking their cars to watch. They like to look at bees like they like to look at snow [storms] on TV: It’s interesting, but they don’t want it at their house.”
When Cody returns, the team continues plodding through the hive, vacuuming up bees as they search for the queen. She is the glue that binds the hive, the originator of the pheromones that give the hive its unique scent, and the only hive member who can lay eggs—a job she does with gusto, pumping out 1,500 to 3,000 a day. Because she’s so vital to the hive’s survival, the Sorensens want to make sure they capture this hive’s royalty.
After trapping as many bees as possible, dousing the space with a scent to mask the pheromones that essentially put out a welcome mat for passing swarms, filling the cavity with insulation, and reassembling the Davenports’ house, they still haven’t spotted the queen. But they know they have her. “She’s in one of those traps,” says Cody, nodding toward two buckets of bees—one enveloped by stray bees buzzing to get in, the other sitting undisturbed. “You can figure out which one.”
Step away from the bug spray.
Occasionally stories of bees invading homes are picked up by local news sources (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in March: “Hundreds of Homeless Bees Try Move into Marietta Home”; WSB-TV in May: “Millions of Bees Invade Georgia Home”). Mostly, these stories go unnoticed, yet bee infestation plays out almost daily in the metro area.
Bees prefer to build their hives in trees, but in the last twenty years Atlanta has lost 60 percent of its natural tree cover, leaving bees no choice but to find other abodes. When bees go house hunting, they’re looking for a spacious cavity with room for their growing family. If it’s somewhat temperature controlled, even better. The spaces between your floor joists and inside your walls are welcoming. A gap of half an inch or more is an invitation for them to set up house. The only way to guarantee a bee-free home is to seal any exploitable opening.
Sorensen has taken about 1.4 million bees from homes and businesses around Atlanta in the last eight years. As one of only three licensed, insured removalists in the metro area, he’s often booked a month out and handles two to four jobs a week. Bill Owens, the state’s only Certified Master Craftsman Beekeeper (the highest rank a Georgia beekeeper can achieve), does fifty to a hundred removals a year. Cindy Bee, Georgia Beekeeper of the Year in 2006, handles seven or eight jobs a week during peak season. A visit from one of these contractors will take, on average, about six hours and cost you around 550 bucks. Sound pricey? There’s always the alternative:
Have the bees sprayed with pesticide. If effective, this can leave a pile of dead bees as large as a small dog in your walls, as Owens puts it. Without getting too graphic, let’s just say Eau de Dead Bee is not a fragrance you’d use to make the place homier. Without bees to act as guards, it won’t be long until small beetles, wax moths, cockroaches, and other parasites discover all the tasty honey and honeycomb left behind. Hive beetles can and will munch away on your sheetrock and woodwork. Their larvae won’t think twice about soiling the hive, and that contamination will cause the honey to ferment. “This nasty bubbling goo runs out of the comb and into your house,” Owens explains. “There isn’t any type of paint or stain that can cover or stop the mold that will follow. The homeowner’s only choice is to remove and replace what was contaminated.” Most homeowners insurance policies do not cover damage caused by insects, so you’re on your own with the ensuing bill. Sort of starts to make $550 seem like a bargain.
Cindy Bee was once called to a Powder Springs home where the owners had used pesticide on a hive. In the wake of the extermination, the wax moth population had grown so large and fruitful the fat pre-metamorphosis worms were coming in through the electrical outlets. The kids were freaking out. The homeowners were unable to stop the advancement of the slimy brigade and eventually moved. Another call led Bee to Roswell, where a homeowner had killed a colony before heading to Europe for two months. He came back to a basement reeking of fermented honey. Part of the ceiling had collapsed onto his Ping-Pong table.
County extension agents and pest-control companies usually refer homeowners to bee specialists. Yet Mike Sorensen says many callers have other concerns. “The most common question I’m asked is, ‘Are those the killer bees?’”
This is the part about “killer bees.” Please remain calm.
Along the Georgia-Florida border, you’ll find five- to ten-gallon flowerpots dangling from trees—at least that’s what they look like to your untrained eye. To a passing bee of any type, the containers look like a perfect nesting place. To the Georgia and Florida agriculture departments, they are the key to determining whether killer bees have entered Georgia.
The “flowerpots” contain a pheromone that encourages bees to settle in. Once they do, Florida inspectors send a sample to the USDA lab in Tucson, Arizona, to determine if they are killer bees.
Right now, there are no killer bees in Georgia. But many believe they are on their way.
That’s reason for concern because, as their nickname suggests, “killer bees” are dangerous. A Florida man’s death on April 9 marked that state’s first human fatality and the eighteenth in the U.S. since the race of bees was first discovered in Hidalgo, Texas, in 1990. Countless pet and livestock deaths have occurred, including nearly two dozen animals in Florida during a two-year period. Hundreds of people have lost their lives to these bees in South and Central America.
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