The Saga of the Bees (Part II)

We left our readers with a bit of a cliffhanger at the end of our first installment of “The Great Summer Bee Caper.”  It’s been so long since we ran the story that readers may be forgiven for having forgotten the details of our not-quite-Hitchcockian tale.  It all began with the sudden arrival of a honeybee swarm in the neighborhood, and it ended (or at least our narrative did) with the bees swarming up 42nd Avenue. Our intrepid ‘bee wrangler’ from Fremont, Patti Loesche, was charging after them in her car.  Here, we pick up the story:

What Val Ellis may have been thinking as she watched the bees make their escape from her front yard has not been recorded (that’s her in the photo above, observing the mass exodus from the other side of the street).  But it’s a safe bet that she was relieved to discover that the lovely ceanothus bush located just ten feet from her front door was being rejected as the ultimate destination of the madding swarm.

We know exactly what beekeeper Patti Loesche was thinking, however, as she jumped into the car to begin her hot pursuit: “I was sure I would run into those bees again at some point. I knew they were looking for a new home.”

As she followed the swarm up the street, the main body was lost to sight; but as she rounded the corner of E. Lynn and headed toward Lake Washington, she encountered “something like a scene from an Armageddon movie,” she says. “I had no detective work to do.” What she saw was one woman running down the street in mad flight while two other women were frozen in place with horrified looks on their faces, pointing to a tall cedar tree at the North end of the waterfront park.  Looking up to where the women were pointing, Patti saw that the bees were safely ensconced high in the tree.

Though not perfectly equipped for the assignment, Patti set to work. The goal: entice the bees into the artificial hive.  It’s not a simple process, nor a quick operation.  Getting honeybees to settle down in a new hive takes some gentle coaxing and a lot of patience.  Not to mention more than a little stamina.

Patti set her ladder up against the base of the tree, climbed up, and got to work.   Work, in the case, meaning holding a box of wooden frames next to a giant swarm of bees and hoping that they’ll decide (in the words of Patti Loesche) “Oh, here’s a good place!”

Soon, some of the bees started inspecting the box.  “Once they do that, everyone goes in,” Patti says.  “The bees were very calm, and many were on top of the box fanning their scent to bring the other bees in.  Because of this, I believe that the queen must have gone in, though I did not see her,” she notes.

Though it became a tedious, backbreaking, box-holding endurance test for Patti, many of the bees finally coalesced into their new location after about an hour. She then vigorously shook the tree branch and a few thousand more bees landed in the box.  During all this time she had been perched about 15 feet up the cedar tree. “But by now I had bonded with the swarm, so I was willing to wait on them for awhile.” It’s not a procedure she says she would recommend to anyone, however.

After about two thirds of the bees were in the box, she took it farther down the tree and set it on a lower ladder.  It was getting late in the day, and under normal conditions she would have left the box overnight.  Given its location in a public park, however, she decided this was not such a hot idea.  So after waiting a bit longer for more of the bees to enter the box, she closed the entrance, considering the bee-capture operation a job well done.  She estimates she collected around 80% of the bee swarm.

From that point it was just a matter of clearing up the equipment, getting the hive into the car, and setting off with the swarm for its new home in Fremont.

And the bees?  They’re doing just fine, according to Patti.  “It was a huge and robust hive,” she says, though the swarm’s queen apparently diappeared sometime after entering the box.  Fortunately, Patti was able to successfully combine the new hive with an older one in her backyard apiary (she currently has a total of five hives, including two located in a neighbor’s yard).

“Just what were those bees doing swarming in Madison Park?” we asked.  “It’s an absolutely natural event,” Patti reports. “Bees swarm one or more times a season, either to reproduce or because they’re overcrowded. This swarm occurred right when it’s supposed to.”  She believes it came from someone’s hive, probably one that had become overcrowded, forcing the bees to move on.

And as for Val Ellis’s ceanothus bush (shown above), was it really a likely place for the bees to find a new home?  “Not at all,” says Patti. “They were just resting there while deciding where to relocate the colony.”  She notes that the swarm could have moved on into the Arboretum or possibly into a crevice at someone in the neighborhood’s house.  “Scouts had been sent out,” she notes, “and I could see that the bees were beginning to dance on top of the swarm faster and faster.  I knew they were going to make a move.”  It just occurred a bit sooner than she had planned.

In the end, however, the Day of the Bees in Madison Park ended well for just about all involved.  The folks on 42nd Avenue got a dose of excitement without any fallout; the beekeeper got another honeybee swarm to add to her collection; and the bees, for the most part, found themselves in a fine new home.

But not quite all of them.  On the day following the mass honeybee emigration, a few lost and forlorn bees were still to be seen flying around in aimless circles near the cedar tree. If they could’ve, they would’ve cried, “Wha happa?”

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Thanks to Patti Loesche for sharing her photos and telling us the Rest of the Story.  Patti has been a beekeeper for about four years.  She says she got into beekeeping because a friend was doing it and it was fascinating to see how orderly and coordinated those thousands of bees could be: “I just love watching their behavior.”

[Photo of Val Ellis watching the bees vamoose by Sara Perkins.]

The great summer bee caper

Honeybee swarm causes a ruckus

It was a quiet, tranquil and, rare-for-July, sunny summer day on 42nd Avenue E. when the bees came.  As the morning wore on, however, it began to dawn on folks living on the block between E. Newton and E. Lynn Streets, that something was not quite right.  The neighborhood was no longer quiet and tranquil.  What was that loud humming, anyway?

Where they came from, no one knows.  But the bees had arrived in a giant swarm, and for some reason they decided that a big bush in front of the home of Val Ellis would be a pleasant destination.  Though Val and her husband were oblivious to the sudden bee invasion, some of their neighbors had become aware of the situation.  Naturally, they were alarmed. Val’s immediate neighbor, Anton, called her to break the news:  “Say, Val, are you aware that there are thousands of bees in your front yard?”

What Val discovered when she looked out the window was quite a sight. “I freaked out,” she told us. “I knew nothing about bees, but there they were just ten feet from my front door!” And the bees weren't all resting peacefully in their newfound bush, either.  Many were doing what bees do: swarming all over the place, occasionally massing themselves on neighbors’ windows, and buzzing out into the street.

It was clear that the neighbors expected some kind of solution out of her, Val said.  “They were up in arms!”  Apart from their concerns, Val herself was plenty motivated to get the bees gone--the sooner the better.

So she took action.  She called an exterminator: “Get down to Madison Park pronto. We’ve got an emergency!” she cried. [At this point we should note that Val doesn’t remember exactly what she said because she was still freaking out, so she gave us permission to misquote her, if necessary, to heighten the drama of the story.]  The exterminators said they’d soon be on their way:  “Don’t worry, lady, those bees are gonna be history.”

Meanwhile, however, cooler heads prevailed.  A neighbor, having investigated the commotion, asked his arborist (who just happened to be on site) to take a look at the situation.  The arborist immediately identified the bush (or perhaps tree, Val was a bit unsure which it was). More importantly, the arborist identified the bees as honeybees.  As everyone knows, honeybees are in crisis mode.  You certainly can’t exterminate honeybees!  We need every one we’ve got!

So on to Plan B:  Call the Bee Lady.  In this case, Patti Loesche, a beekeeper from Fremont who is a member of the Puget Sound Beekeepers Association.  It seems that honeybee swarms are not uncommon around here, and the PSBA maintains a list of beekeepers ready and willing to pick them up and find the bees a new home (in the beekeeper’s apiary, of course). Loesche arrived on the scene within an hour or so (the exterminators earlier having been called off).  She immediately got to work.

The neighbors, of course, remained riveted to the scene (though at a safe distance).   Honeybees swarms are not aggressive, Loesche pointed out. She then explained to the crowd how she was going to entice those very bees into an artificial hive she’d brought expressly for that purpose.  “As you can see I have here…”

As it turned out, however, educating an uninformed public and catching honeybees are two different objectives that can’t necessarily be undertaken simultaneously.  While the educational process seemed to be going pretty well, the bees were apparently coming to the conclusion that they didn’t much like what they were hearing. Suddenly the Queen decided to take off--and the swarm, following her, made a bee-line down the street.  “They’re getting away!” the crowd yelled in unison.

"Come back!"

Unperturbed, Loescher leaped into action.  She hoisted the artificial hive back into her vehicle, jumped in, revved the engine, and sped down the street in hot pursuit.  Racing around a corner, she was lost to sight.

The bees gone, the crowd disbursed.


[Thanks to Sara Perkins and Dick Lehman for the photos.  Thanks to Sara Perkins and Val Ellis for telling us the story.  It seemed like such a good place to end the tale, but there's actually more to tell. Return to the blog later this week to learn "The Rest of the Story."]

Bees evacuated from the neighborhood

And we mean literally evacuated, with a vacuum no less. It happened earlier this week, though I was not on hand to see the operation performed. Madison Park resident and blog reader Kay Bean emailed me on Tuesday to say that a gimongous swarm of honey bees was going to be removed from a tree in the neighborhood and that I might want to get down there and cover the story. Well I did want to. But unfortunately, my day job precluded bee coverage that day.

Fortunately, however, KING-TV was on the job. And since that particular TV channel is not trying to run a competing Madison Park blog, I am happy to provide a link to their coverage. It’s a video of Jerry "The Bee Guy" Mixon (that’s him in a file photo to the right) very carefully removing the bees from their chosen branch on E. Newton Street.
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By the way, Jerry is a beekeeper. The bees were not killed in the process of removal and are now presumably enjoying happy and productive lives in their new location, unnamed.