‘Bee Buster’ Says His Job Is a Honey

With dozens of black and gold honeybees staging an air dance around his head, David Marder took a hammer to the wall of a house. Behind the wall, another 50,000 or so bees nuzzled a honey-soaked hive.

After peeking through preliminary holes, with the hum of the bees growing louder, the self-proclaimed “bee buster” stopped to slip on elbow-length gloves.

“I’m going to test their aggressiveness now,” said Marder, 31, who evicts unwanted bees, wasps and hornets across Orange and Los Angeles counties.

Making a last upward tug at the zipper of his protective coveralls, he slammed the hammer into the wall.

“It seems kind of brutal just to pop a hole in somebody’s house, but that’s all you can do,” he said.

Stucco chips flew past his perspiring face as he pounded. Prying until the hole was almost three feet in diameter, he reached into the singing wall and extracted a flat slice of beehive.

“I know this might sound sort of corny, but they have real harmony with everything around them,” Marder said. “And I admire their work ethic. They never stop, never fail.”

Although he was once stung “hundreds of times” on a single job, he says he has no fear.

He once rode a motorized chair on a wire cable up the outside of Orange County’s Performing Arts Center to snatch a bee-infested honeycomb from inside a wall. The task became even more dicey when his glove kept catching as he reached for the buzzing hive.

“I had to take my glove off and reach in there bare-handed and try to pull out the honeycomb, 12 stories up,” he said.

Above all, according to Marder, a beekeeper must stay cool. “You can’t be swatting at bees on a 40-foot ladder.”

It’s the people who are nerve-racking, he says.

“Everybody’s got a bee emergency, and it’s right now.”

With hives flourishing this year, partly because of early rains, Marder said he has been putting in 14-hour days. In addition to snatching hives and capturing swarms, he recently began training Santa Ana police officers and firefighters to deal with the much-heralded Africanized honeybee.

Nicknamed killer bees because they attack quickly and in large numbers, the insects are expected to arrive in Los Angeles and Orange counties within as little as two years.

Marder said he will teach city workers how to suit up and rescue someone under attack and how to destroy the bees.

Still, he fears the killer bees are getting a bad rap.

“There’s a lot of hysteria about the Africanized bees,” he said. “The Africans dealt with those bees for hundreds of years. Why can’t we?”

Marder plans to travel to Panama in November to study the insects. He dreads the day he will be called into battle against them.

“That’s a real bummer,” he said. “It’s going to be a whole different feeling, killing the swarms of bees.”

In dealing with European bees common to this area, Marder tries to capture the queen bee and relocate her colony.

For example, the bees he retrieved from the wall in Laguna Beach this week will be offered to a San Clemente man who wants to set up a hive in his back yard for his 8-year-old son.