While walking through my neighborhood on a warm June afternoon, I heard them; the unmistakable buzz.
And just like an image from a Winnie the Pooh book, there they were, a small bunch of bees swarming a hole in a tree right next to the street.
I'd seen social media photos of bee swarms, and the responses ranged from “burn them out” to suggestions to call a beekeeper.
The first option was a definite no. So I set out to find a beekeeper. I was going to save the bees.
“What you saw would be considered feral bees. At that point, they are not managed,” Frank Walker, president of the Norfolk Beekeepers Association and vice president of Nature Matters, LLC told me.
“People don't understand the importance of our honeybees,” he said. “We lose about 40% of our bees every year.”
Each spring, when the plants and flowers begin to bloom and the bees wake up, it's swarm season. Only the strongest survive winter. And when they wake up, they're ready to conquer and divide.
Scalp bees will force out the mother queen bee and then set off to try to find a new home.
“And that's what you saw. Scout bees identified a home and a tree,” Walker said about my new neighbors.
“They came back and announced to the colony they found the just right home, and that whole colony lit up and took off. And they landed and started a new colony in that tree.”
But not every bee home is “just right.”
“People are going to come and spray those bees, call a local beekeeper, or we will come capture those bees and take them and put them in a managed colony so the bees can continue to pollinate and keep our old green and keep us there,” Walker said.
That's exactly what happened in my neighborhood. A box was attached to the tree with signs warning that bees were being collected.
After several days, the box was gone and the hole had been sealed. Did I save the bees?
Well, maybe a few, but there must be more to saving the bees. So I suited up and joined Walker on a routine hive inspection at St. Patrick's School in Norfolk.
“The message I tried to tell people, You don't have to have a hive in your backyard to be a beekeeper,” he said. “You're a beekeeper. You saw a colony of bees and you called a beekeeper. That's what a beekeeper does. A beekeeper understands the importance of our pollinators and promotes and protects them.”
Walker shared the importance of local planning and planting the appropriate plants, providing a food source for the bees throughout the country. He explained the negative impacts of chemicals and insecticides on the bee population.
He continued as he opened the hive, showing the male bees, also known as drones, and the capped cells of the pupa where the larva quietly evolves into a bee.
There's typically one queen bee to the hive. She lays 1,500 to 2,000 eggs a day. Walker said this specific hive we were inspecting housed about 40,000 bees.
The bees have a hierarchy and their own habits to produce honey.
But bees aren't just making honey – they impact human food sources. They're pollinators, helping plants and crops by carrying pollen from the male part of the flower to the female part of the same or another flower.
A lot of plants can't produce flowers, fruits and veggies without the help of bees and other pollinators.
“So if you put a colony of bees on an apple orchard, the output of that crop is about 30% greater,” Walker said. “So if a farmer would get 10,000 apples an acre, you would get 13,000 apples.”
Several cities in Virginia, including Newport News, Hampton, Virginia Beach and Gloucester are certified with Bees City USA, an initiative of the Xerxes Society.
That means those cities signed a proclamation vowing to avoid the use of certain chemicals and pesticides and to grow fields with native plants and wildflowers. Bee City USA provides a framework for communities to work together to conserve native pollinators.
“The success of any of those programs is all dependent on the citizens that live in that community,” Walker said. “I encourage homeowners to buy local native plants to Virginia and a group of plants that bloom in the spring, some in the summer, some in the fall. So then basically you're giving a buffet to our pollinators.”
