16 Jul Siren Song: Lessons Learned from an Evening with the Bees

It’s somewhere south of an A flat. A whining, winging song of thousands of singing sisters, and a few lazy brothers. The sound is both alarming and enchanting, inviting those who hear it to exercise caution, and to wonder at the society that it signifies. Lacking a band leader, the singers never quite seem to agree on one note, but they are quite certainly a unified chorus. As many as 50,000 honey bees may constitute a single colony, and to watch them work is to receive a humbling lesson in survival and community.

Honey bees have no central leadership. Although the queen will have been the mother of most of the members of the colony, she does not tell her offspring how to live. The hive runs on a complex system of chemical and physical communication. A honey bee colony is what scientists call a “super-organism”, with each member functioning to serve the greater good. Each bee shares in the work of the colony, and all the bees share in the fruit of their labor. To hear the song of a beehive is to hear many singers, as if singing through one mouth.

If you’ve ever had the exhilarating experience of happening upon the honey bees’ siren song, you might have met my friend DJ. Dressed from head to toe in white, DJ might have cut a hole in your wall, or climbed a ladder to your roof, carrying a little can full of fire and a vacuum cleaner. You might not have seen him, though, because he works mostly at night, when the bees are all gathered in their hive. And because you probably don’t know if that siren song portends doom or destiny, DJ has come to take your bees elsewhere.

On the night that I accompany him to a “hive removal”, DJ is his usual, friendly self. On the long drive from Austin out to Lago Vista, DJ does most of the talking. It’s a beautiful, summer night; the sun is just setting, the windows are down, and we are a couple of happy beekeepers on our way to perform a service that almost anybody could do themselves, if they understood the creature they were dealing with.

By the time we reach the job site, it’s gotten dark. The city of Lago Vista called DJ out for the job. (He’s their unofficial bee man now.) But they forgot to mention that there wasn’t an electrical outlet nearby to plug in his light or the vacuum cleaner he’ll use to gently carry the bees away to another home. He knocks on a neighbor’s door to borrow some electricity, but they’ve got a movie going so loud they don’t even hear him. They probably don’t even know the bees are living on their property.

You see, bees are nothing if not opportunistic. In this case, they’ve made a home inside the plastic box surrounding a municipal water meter. That’s how the city came to find them. This busy little hive found the box under a shady bush and set to work building comb and their own little version of the American Dream – out of sight and out of mind, until the meter reader happened upon them.

Before DJ can even get his suit on, an old man who lives in the only other house on this quiet cul-de-sac comes walking up the street with his dog. DJ politely explains what we’re doing, showing the man his gear and telling him where we’ll take the bees afterward. This neighbor didn’t know honey bees lived here either, but he said he was glad we were taking them. He wasn’t afraid of the bees, though. He said he had enjoyed watching them pollinate his old magnolia tree, but he thought we might find them a better home elsewhere. He didn’t know how right he was.

This isn’t the first time DJ has removed bees from a Lago Vista water meter. He’s done it enough now that the city has supplied him with a fresh lid that he can pop on the meter when he’s done. He’s even tinkered with the idea of patenting a little addition to the box that would keep bees out of these water meters for good. Tonight, though, we’ll do it the old-fashioned way: with some hand tools and a smoker.

Removing bees from their chosen residence is a pretty simple operation. Just open up the hive, cut out all the comb, and vacuum up the bees. The comb gets moved into a manmade hive, the bees get dumped in, and away you go. The bees are a bit disoriented, but, because you’ve saved all of their handiwork, the new place smells like home. And everybody they know is there, so it must be home. You can even drive down the highway with the hive in the back of your pickup truck, and the bees just come along for the ride. Removing bees from a water meter box is an even simpler proposition.

Honey bees always build their comb hanging in vertical strips. In the water meter, these strips hang from the lid of the box. Just pop off the lid, and the whole hive goes with it. For an experienced beekeeper like DJ, this is easy money. Tonight’s bees seem particularly easy. We give them a little smoke to confuse their chemical communication, pop the lid off the water meter and set it inside a closed container to carry away with us. The bees don’t even seem to get mad about it. DJ has a full suit to protect himself from stings. But I’m just wearing long sleeves; I don’t even have anything to cover my face.

Once we get the lid off the meter and take a closer look inside, we see that something is wrong – very wrong.

The ground inside the water meter is covered with dead bees. There are so many that the ground beneath them is no longer visible; it’s just bodies. A few of the bodies are moving, still struggling against whatever chemical warfare was waged on them, wallowing among the corpses of their sisters.

“Probably 40% of the time,” says DJ, people will spray some kind of poison on the bees before they even think to call somebody who knows what they’re doing. “It happens a lot,” he says. Like a bad cop in some Hollywood movie, a homeowner will shoot first and ask questions later. Nobody doesn’t like a sweet spoonful of the bees’ treasured honey. But bees are so misunderstood, and so feared, that a lot people have trouble coming face-to-face with the producer of that sweet treat.

“That’s kind of what it’s about,” says DJ, “Keeping people calm, having them not do stupid things, like spraying poison.” Aside from the occasional bear-shaped bottle purchased from the grocery store, most people probably haven’t thought much about honey bees. If you’ve heard anything about bees in the last 10 or 20 years, you’ve probably heard about “Killer Bees” or the doom and gloom scenario known as “Colony Collapse Disorder”. What you probably haven’t heard is that you’re more likely to get struck by lightning than killed by bees, and the collapse disorder in honey bees has just as much to do with our colony as it does theirs.

There are more than 2 million commercially “managed” beehives in the United States. (It’s hard to know how many “feral” colonies, like the one DJ and I removed, but, to be sure, there are enough to keep him busy every night of the week.) These managed hives have been used for hundreds of years to produce honey. But faced with foreign competition, and in the face of changing domestic agricultural practices, American beekeepers have lately had to make their living by trucking their bees around the country, working them as pollinators-for-hire. A commonly quoted statistic says that 1 in 3 mouthfuls of our food has been pollinated by honey bees. And all this traveling for work has really taken it out on the bees, but their annual mileage is probably the least of their worries.

Like people, honey bees need a varied diet to keep themselves healthy. On the farms they visit, however, there is often only one kind of food growing – corn, soy, almonds. Imagine stepping off the plane from your business trip, and all you get at the other end is more tiny baggies of peanuts. Somebody’s not gonna be a happy camper. But this is the way modern agriculture works. Fewer and fewer farmers grow single crops on bigger and bigger tracts of land – all of this serving to interrupt natural systems that maintain balance through diversity and competition.

What’s more, these monocultures are often treated with a variety of pesticides and herbicides, which the honey bee in its wanderings gathers along with pollen and nectar. These days, even the seeds are engineered such that the resulting plant produces its own pesticides as it grows. Every part of the plant has something toxic to offer an insect.

While no one can say for sure what will push a colony of honey bees over the edge into collapse and disorder, the best science suggests that it’s an all-of-the-above scenario. Stress from being moved hundreds of miles, feeding on a limited diet, exposure to compounding poisons – all of these combined serve to bring the bees to their knees. And while we beekeepers feel acutely the plight of our black and yellow striped friends, the rest of our human community ought likewise to be concerned. 

After we get back from our hive removal, DJ and I sit around talking shop. I’m more than a little surprised, I tell him. So much attention is paid to beekeepers losing their precious brood, and he’s going out every night of the week to take away bees that no one even wants. “I’m not even the only person that does this,” he says. “There’s a lot of people that will do it for free; there’s guys that charge a whole lot more than me, right here in Austin.” While the commercial beekeeper may have cause for concern, it’s probably not the honey bee species that has the most to lose in this scenario. They will likely go on colonizing the country, with or without our help. But what about all those mouthfuls of food that they are responsible for providing us? The honey bee’s siren song has a clear message for us, and we ought to be listening with rapt attention.

We fear what we don’t understand, and what we don’t understand is that the bees are telling us to be afraid of ourselves, not them. It is not Nature we have to fear, but our fearful aberrations from her design. What the bees are telling us is that we won’t destroy the things we’re afraid of, but we may destroy ourselves in an effort to extinguish our fears.