HUNTINGTON BEACH : Bee Careful: Hives Halt Demolition

Bulldozers leveling storage houses on an abandoned mushroom farm have been stalled this week by more than 120,000 bees producing their annual harvest of honey in three empty sheds.

A week after the demolition work began at the 1920s-era farm on Golden West Street near Ellis Avenue, nine of 51 storage houses have yet to be bulldozed, a job that would ordinarily have taken just a few days.

The bees are not just being removed but saved, said Dennis Patton, project specialist for Pomona Valley Equipment Demolition & Site Clearance, the demolition company hired by the city.

Last year, the city bought the farm to relocate an adjacent mobile home park and build part of a golf course, key provisions of a city redevelopment project.

When Patton’s crews discovered the bee problem, he said, he decided to call in an expert handler. “It costs us the same to take them out this way as it would to bring in an exterminator,” Patton said. “And, that (extermination), of course, means killing them. And why would we want to do that?”

Patton’s firm hired David Dziedzic, a bee removal expert with Action Bee Control in Long Beach. When Dziedzic, 29, first saw the site, he said: “This looks like a bee farm, not a mushroom farm.”

Dziedzic estimated that each of the six remaining hives now contains 20,000 to 75,000 bees, about one-third the number that would be nesting during the peak summer months.

He devoted much of his first day on the job, Saturday, to removing a single hive, a network of honeycomb 8 1/2 feet high along the inside of one wall--unusually tall, he said, because the bees were constricted into an 18-inch gap between studs.

The painstaking process, which consumed five hours, began with Dziedzic--in his protective suit, veil and gloves--boring a hole into the wall. Then, using a small canister equipped with a hand pump, he injected smoke into the hole, scattering an initial swarm.

“By using smoke on them, it simulates a forest fire,” Dziedzic said. “During a forest fire, they naturally gorge themselves on honey, trying to gather as much food as they can before they leave. So they’re preoccupied with that, and not me.”

Next, Dziedzic, using a crowbar, pried apart a pair of redwood planks surrounding the hole, exposing a wall of honeycomb. He then used a handsaw to remove a square wooden block, pumped in more smoke and, with his hands, began removing large pieces of hive.

Within 90 minutes, he had sawed a large rectangular hole in the building wall, exposing the entire towering hive. As the comb was removed, Dziedzic loaded the bees into ventilated wooden boxes containing a series of frames, on which the bees will form a new hive and where they will be stored, he said.

The process is always slow until he finds the queen bee, the key to the entire process, he said. Once the queen is found and placed in the box, the rest of the colony will soon follow.

Dziedzic estimated that the hive contained 30,000 bees and probably 200 pounds of honey. The hive is slightly larger than average, but he has since discovered another in a separate building that is even more massive, with 75,000 bees.