A Stinger in L.A.’s Summer : Weather Touches Off Furious Onslaught of Bees, Yellow Jackets

Ah, summer. For all its troubles, Los Angeles shines when the days grow long. Or so Howard Klingsberg had hoped. He was all set to splash in the pool and savor cookouts on the patio. He had this idyllic notion about lying around on the new hammock he just got for his 52nd birthday.

Then came the hornets, springing out of the ground in a scourge that Stephen King might have dreamed up.

“We can’t go outside,” the Studio City resident complained Thursday after cleaning several back-yard traps of about 1,000 yellow jackets, with more arriving by the minute. The onslaught marred a barbecue last weekend, when a pack of the ground-burrowing hornets appeared out of nowhere, descending on a salad and driving everyone indoors. At this point, that new hammock is about the last place Klingsberg wants to lay his nerve-racked body.

“We’re taking it back,” he said of the gift. “We’re going to get something else . . . (maybe) trade it on some insecticide.”

In the wooded hillsides and tree-shrouded neighborhoods of Los Angeles, summer heat invariably brings out the hornets and bees--but this year is different. This year, all the prayers were answered: A rainy winter helped end the drought. A mild spring softened the mood of a strife-torn metropolis.

Plants grew, touching off a proliferation of insects. They, in turn, became the food stock for hungry multitudes of hornets and bees.

All of which has set the phone lines buzzing at places such as Hydrex Pest Control in Van Nuys. Owner Gordon Fries said he has never seen such a “bee craze” in his 25 years there. The calls have poured in from Beverly Hills, Canoga Park, Chatsworth, Pacific Palisades--you name it.

“I’ve had as (many) as 14 bee jobs in one day,” Fries said. “It’s been a real big year--a real big year.”

The worst is far from over, according to Michael Pearson, an agricultural inspector with Los Angeles County’s Bee Information Section. “Bees normally swarm starting in, oh, late February . . . and start trailing off sometime around August or September,” Pearson said. A later-than-usual boom in the bee population is probably about at its peak, he said.

At the same time, yellow jacket queens are producing eggs in subterranean nests that may grow to 20,000 hornets in some exceptional cases in Los Angeles, Pearson said. In the tropics, he added, some species even create year-round colonies that house up to 1 million wasps, although Los Angeles is safe from that.

“Sometime in the early fall, the queen will stop laying,” Pearson said. “At that point, they change their diet (from insects) to sugar and nectar.” Hornets will then go to trash cans, soda pop cans, “anywhere they can get the sugar they need,” he said.

Other pests also are abundant, including paper wasps, which construct their fibrous nests under the eaves of houses, and bumblebees, which tend to take up residence in garage clutter and soft grasses.

Joe Bell, a Burbank beekeeper who charges $65 or more to get rid of bees and wasps, has done much of his recent business in Alhambra and other San Gabriel Valley communities, where bees infest the trunks of oak trees. Bell sucks them out with a power vacuum and seals up the tree trunks with concrete, said his wife, Merle.

Bees and wasps are often attacked with traps or pesticides. But occasionally, the infestations prove intractable. On one of their outings on Thursday, the Bells visited a Bel-Air mansion where bees had invaded an air-conditioning system. “Short of taking the air conditioner out,” Merle Bell said, “all you could do was spray.”

A home in Montrose has bees every year because of a hive inside a wall between a fireplace and a chimney. “To get to it, you’d have to tear the fireplace down,” Merle said. “And even if you kill the bees, within six months you’ll have another swarm move in, because they smell the wax and honey.”

To make matters worse, a certain hysteria has developed because Los Angeles lies within the flight path of “killer bees,” moving north from Mexico, according to pest control officials. Tony Garcia, manager of Stanley Pest Control in Culver City, said a worried woman called from Silver Lake Thursday after seeing a single bumblebee land on her wood-shingle roof.

“She wants us to come out . . . (for $80) to eliminate this one bee,” Garcia said.

If this year is bad, just wait until next year, or the year after, when the killer bees do make their appearance here, Pearson said.

Two weeks ago, a swarm of those ultra-aggressive pests reached Tucson, where they killed a dog, the county bee expert said.

“By the summer of ‘95, they’ll probably hit L.A.,” Pearson said. “I think it’s going to be very hazardous for public health. If people are not educated to know how to react and protect themselves . . . there are going to be many, many attacks--maybe even some human deaths.”