For Bee Herders, It’s a Big Roundup Season

For us worriers, 2001 has been one heck of a year: rolling blackouts, a plunging Nasdaq, and now local bee removers say they’re facing one of the heaviest swarm years in four decades. Which, for bee wranglers like Don Sorensen of Bee n’ Wasp Nest Removal Service in Torrance, is as good as a bull market on Wall Street. A former beekeeper, Sorensen--with his daughter, Wendy--relocates bees from human territory to more hospitable locales. Here’s the buzz.

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The worst swarming in decades? What gives?

Our weather has been unusual this year, which, I think, has confused the trees into blooming early. Bees may be out of sync as well.

Other than very carefully, how do you wrangle a bee?

Bees communicate by smell. We’ll blow smoke on them, so the bees can’t smell, which means they can’t communicate. Then we sweep them into a box. Most of the time, the queen is in the middle of the swarm, so she drops into the box and we put on the cover, leave a hole, and they fly into the box.

What does a bee relocation package look like?

I give the bees to other beekeepers. They put a new European queen in a little box to make sure they’re breeding European bees. Then you take the old queen, whip off her head and scrub her body all over the outside of the wax box.

That’s pretty extreme.

It’s tough. But that way, it smells like the old queen. When the new European honeybee queen eats her way through the wax box [in a day or so], the hive will accept her because she’ll have the smell. Worker bees’ life expectancy is about one month, so by the second month, all the queen’s children will be European honeybees.

Are those the bees we’re rooting for?

They’re not as territorial as Africanized bees.

Have you come face to face with killer bees?

It’s hard to know. When you’re messing with bees, they tend to get hostile no matter who they are.

Any bee war stories?

I do recall this woman in the Palos Verdes area who discovered bees on her roof. It was a modern home with a series of flat roofs. She’s up there spraying these bees and feeling really good because she got 300 or so. What she didn’t know is that a swarm of bees can number up to 100,000. So the rest start coming after her. She’s running from roof to roof, finally jumping into the pool. And they’re just hovering over the water, waiting for her.

Did the swarm make that cool arrow shape like they do in cartoons?

Afraid not.