What’s all the buzz about?
According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, one out of every three mouthfuls of food in the American diet is, in some way, a product of honeybee pollination.
“And because bees are dying at a rapid rate (42 percent of bee colonies collapsed in the United States alone in 2015), our food supply is at serious risk,” the NRDC states at NRDC.org. “The bee’s plight is widespread: Serious declines have been reported in both managed honeybee colonies and wild populations.”
Gary Hall, owner and operator of Northwest Bee Removal, cites these same facts. The critical link that bees play in the human food supply, and that of animals, birds and countless other living things, is why he refuses to kill bees. Instead, he takes great effort to relocate them when he is called to help with any bee infestation.
“Bees do about 99 percent of our pollination. They are the most important there is,” he said. “All the fruit and most vegetables have to be pollinated and if they’re not pollinated, they’re not going to exist. I can’t imagine the planet without fruits and vegetables, not to mention all the flowers.”
Last week, Hall was called to a job at the University of Puget Sound where the Alpha Phi sorority house’s chimney had become a busy hive for a large colony of honeybees. Director of Media Relations Veronica Craker said Hall’s no-kill policy fits perfectly with the University’s commitment to not use pesticides on the main campus.
“We’re very pleased with his approach. We fully believe in the importance of environmental stewardship and the preservation of the natural ecosystem. Bees are vital so relocating protects the bees and contributes to the overall biodiversity of our campus,” she said.
That it’s not a one-day job is not an issue among the sorority housemates.
“The students living in that building have been extremely gracious, flexible and patient with us so we’re very appreciative of them,” Craker said.
Hall described it as a pretty big job, as the bees were deep within the double chimney. The first step was to trap them, which is easier said than done. Hall’s tactic in this job, and others, was to lure the bees into a wooden box hive that he put next to the chimney. Placing bee babies inside the box from another hive draws the attention of the worker bees and bit by bit, the bees exit the chimney and go to live in their nice new home.
“I make it so they get out of the hive and can’t get back in, which is difficult to keep doing because they’re really smart to figure out how to get back in,” Hall said. “It takes a few days before you get them all to go in because usually, they’ll sit outside the (box hive) for a day or so, but it gets cold at night, and they don’t like the cold so then they’ll go in.”
Once he collects all the bees that he can, he takes the box hives to his home and acts as a foster parent to the bees as they get established in their new digs. He provides them with plenty of sugar water and his yard is full of flowers for the bees to feed on. He puts some of the bees’ honeycomb from their former hive inside the box hive as well to make them feel more at home.
“I try to put at least a tray of it in the new hive, as much as was in the old hive as possible. It’s familiarity and they love familiarity. If they’re happy and they’re producing honeycomb, then you know they’re not going to take off.”
Hall’s goal is to give the hives to people who will take care of the bees, including offering them to local community gardens. He is determined to put to rest a misconception that beekeepers need many acres at hand for the bees to stay in their box hives and survive. In fact, he says bees are safer in urban settings versus acreage at a large food producing farm or agricultural site because there is much less risk for the bees to encounter pesticides, a leading killer of bee populations.
Courtesy The Tacoma Weekly
This photo of the sorority house chimney shows just a small portion of the bees’ hive.
“If people in the city realize that they can have a hive or two, it’s not very expensive and it’s so gratifying, how much you’re helping the environment,” he said, and there is the delicious honey that can be gathered.
“I have the best garden in the world – tons of tomatoes, all the fruit that they pollinate – it’s really easy for people to have them. You can have a little urban lot and have them in your backyard.”
Hall said that when he first started bringing beehives to his home, he was concerned that his neighbors might be alarmed by the sudden appearance of so many bees flying around, but the opposite happened as his neighbors saw the benefit of bees pollinating plants and trees around their homes.
“I was worried that when I first took them there that people were going to freak out, but they freaked out when I took them away. They said, ‘Where are all the bees? I had so many apples this year!’ and it was because we had the bees,” Hall said.
Hall has been doing bee and wasp removal for about 17 years and how he got into it goes back to his experience in construction and as a painting contractor. There were times doing this work when he had to remove a bee or wasp nest, so it wasn’t new to him, but it was kicked up a notch when he advertised on Craigslist for maintenance work opportunities.
One day, he received a call from Adkins Bee Removal in California asking him if he could do a few jobs here locally. He was also asked the question, “Are you allergic to bees?”
Adkins spread Hall’s phone number across the internet and calls started coming in. As Hall tells it, “He said I was going to get about seven to 10 calls a week and I got that many calls a day.”
Hall admits that he really didn’t know what he was getting into back then, but he took bee and wasp removal jobs anyway – and was stung enough times that he reached out to Robbins Honey Farm in Lakewood for help.
“Those guys taught me the ropes. I would bring all my bees to them every time I got them, and they would put them out in the mountains and stuff,” Hall said.
Soon he had what he needed for efficient bee removal including the necessary full body covering and even a special vacuum that sucks bees in without harming them. His teenage sons, Ethan and Trevor, came onboard to help too, and he gets help when he needs it from a couple part-time assistants, but most jobs he can do himself.
While bees can be docile and less likely to sting if Hall moves slowly and poses no obvious threat, wasps are another story.
“They’re a little harder because they’re really trying to kill you when you’re just trying to save them. There are a lot of people that want us to relocate those too, so we do whatever the customer wishes on those.”
If it is necessary to kill the wasps, Hall uses eco-friendly means to do so.
“I try to take them live but when I do have to use something, I don’t use a poison. We don’t use any kind of poison at all.”
Bumblebee removal is a specialty of Hall’s, and he takes as much care with removing them as he does honeybees even though bumblebees represent a much smaller portion of the overall bee population.
“There’s nobody that does bumblebees because they don’t think that 2 percent is much but it’s a lot,” he said. “When you look at a bush, there’s always a bumblebee on the flowers. They’re a huge help to our environment and they’re so easy to relocate. They don’t have hives of 50,000. They have hives of 100, 120… They’re probably the smartest ones too.”
Hall encourages everyone who can to bring bees into their lives both for the personal experience of these wondrous creatures and to help counteract the decline of bee populations. He recommends two hives for beginners.
“If it’s your first time and you have just one, you don’t know what to expect or if what they’re doing is the norm. If you have two hives, you can see if they’re both doing the same thing,” he explained.
“If just 3, 5, or 10 percent of people had bees, think how much of an impact that would make. It would be millions of bees. It’s just a little bit of work in the fall and spring. You would spend more time mowing your lawn than you would taking care of bees.”
Contact Gary Hall at Northwest Bee Removal by calling 253-478-6786.
