Honeybee Secret’s Out, and So Is the Fruit

There is more to a great city than its panics and problems. There is also its capacity for secrets, for allowing the wanderer to turn a corner and stumble into a place like Evadale Drive. You pull off the Pasadena Freeway just past downtown Los Angeles and go up a hill, and up farther. The houses are modest. The freeway is noisy. But the yards--oh, dear neighbor, the yards.

They are hillside yards, terraced into the canyon. Fruit packs the local lemon and orange trees. Flowers spill down the sides of the road. The bounty stands out because the street overlooks a wilderness preserve where the canyons parch to a brittle, scrubby yellow. But for a decade and a half, Evadale has had a secret:

Honeybees.

“I first find these bees in 1984.” This is the gardener, Guadalupe Duran. Duran is a big man in a big straw hat. The caretaker of a house a block off Evadale, he discovered his first hive in a pile of castoff lumber. “I put it in a box,” he recalls, “and take it back to the house, for pollinating the trees.”

One hive became two hives, and two hives grew to 20. The gardener kept the colonies in boxes the size of file drawers in his backyard. Duran’s father had kept bees back in Mexico when Duran was a child. Duran admired their industriousness and found them calming. “We had nine kids,” the gardener reminisced, “and when he would take the honey out, he would give everybody one delicious piece of the comb.”

Each hive had a thousand or so bees, and each bee had a lust for nectar. Soon Duran’s yard was the pollinated envy of the neighborhood. When the bees multiplied again, he went to a friend on Evadale, Frank Frisk, a fellow gardening enthusiast whose big backyard tumbles down a ravine and up to the boundary of the 282-acre Ernest E. Debs wilderness area.

And as the years passed, 40 more hives quietly colonized the far end of the gardener’s neighbor’s backyard.

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“Look at this,” Frank Frisk is in his garden brandishing a yellowish, pinkish variegated globe of fruit. “A pink lemon! We have oranges and limes and grapefruits and apple trees, too.” A flock of little birds rustles the oleander; a red-tailed hawk circles. The city air is thick with L.A.’s signature residential fragrance of smog and roses. Frisk, an 85-year-old retired furniture salesman in a checkered work shirt, starts listing his plants and can’t stop:

Plums, pears, guavas, avocados, Japanese cucumbers, peppers, roma tomatoes, zucchini. “Red apple,” a bright green ground cover with tiny red flowers, over which a dozen bees float as the white-haired man talks. “Look at this. It’s a plu-ot, a cross between a plum and an apricot,” he instructs as the honeybees hover. Fourteen years they’ve been in his yard, he says, and he’s only been stung once. “People don’t realize how much good these bees do.”

Of course, the neighbors could guess from their gardens, or from their taste buds. Kevin Hughes, who lives down the street, says that over the years virtually everyone in the neighborhood has been given honey by Frisk and Duran. It was never for sale, he says, only for giving--”more jars of honey than Martha Stewart would go to the trouble of bottling.”

But that was before the secret of Evadale Drive was brought to an end.

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The culprit was panic, which, as always, caused problems. A few months ago, the TV news aired a string of reports on killer bees. They’d apparently been sighted--far, far from Evadale, but no matter. When a new neighbor noticed thereafter that some wild bees had set up camp in a stand of eucalyptus, the buzz started: How could the neighborhood be sure that Frisk and Duran weren’t harboring a hazard? What if those weren’t just honeybees, but latent monsters in their backyards? Someone anonymously called the L.A. Department of Building and Safety, and soon “Order To Comply” notices had been stuffed in Frisk’s and Duran’s front doors.

Seems it had been illegal, all those years, to keep bees inside the city limits, even with a nature preserve as a neighbor. The two men could have fought City Hall, but somehow, they say, that seemed equally hysterical and panicky. They posted a “bees-for-sale” sign at the local beekeeping supply store. By the end of October, their pets will be pollinating an avocado orchard near Fallbrook someplace.

The people suspected of being the anonymous tipsters posted a sign, too, outside their house: For Sale. And so, to the satisfaction of no one, the Killer Bee Panic of Evadale has been quietly resolved. Nature abhors a moral, so none will be offered. Still, the metropolis seems less sweet for both departures, somehow.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.