Saving the bees

"Sue! There's a bunch of bees out behind our office!" Sharon Hrdlicka, office manager for Ponderosa Properties, announced when Sue picked up the ringing phone. "OK, Sharon, thank you," Sue replied, "I'll tell Jim when he gets back."

At the time I was out banding American Kestrel nestlings near Tumalo Reservoir with my nest-box partner, Don McCartney and a bunch of OMSI students from Cascade Science School in Bend. When I heard the message on my pocket phone, I shouted, "Yahoo! More freebees!"

Most of the time, a swarm of bees (numbering about 8,000 females, 10 or so drones - males - and one queen) will stay put for at least a couple of hours before they take wing to their new home.

This swarm had other plans. They first landed on a small tree right outside the office wall, so close, in fact, that one of the agents, Catherine Black, could hear them buzzing. For some reason, however, the scouts didn't like that location, so they took the swarm up and up to a branch of a huge ponderosa pine high above the office roof.

I didn't arrive on the scene until around 3 p.m., and when I saw the swarm high above the slanting roof of the Ponderosa Properties office I knew both the bees and I were in trouble. I went immediately to the fire hall for help, but the insurance carriers won't allow the fire department to rescue cats in trees anymore, let alone recover a bee swarm.

Time to get my good friends at Sisters Storage & Rental into the picture (again). I had called Pat Thompson, the owner, for help putting a Great Horned Owl back into a nest a while back, and as usual - as it is with everyone in the Sisters business community - he didn't even hesitate, and said, "You bet, no problem."

It was the same way with my bee problem. As I drove up to the Ponderosa Properties office, Larry Avery, Sisters Storage & Rental employee, came rolling into the backyard with a high-lift cherry-picker loaded on the lowboy. Typical of professional people who are so good at what they do and know how to do it, Larry maneuvered the cherry-picker into a tight spot on the Ponderosa Properties office lawn, right up against the roof and said, "OK, Jim; it's all yours. I'm not going up there with all those bees."

Even though I tried to explain that a swarm of bees is usually no threat, no one volunteered to go up in the basket with me to help save those poor bees and put them in their new home. So, I climbed into the basket, and with Larry as a backup (and also a "go-forward") I got as close to the swarm as I could.

It's tricky removing a bee swarm from a tree limb, especially if the limb is as big as your wrist. You can't saw the limb off, as it shakes the bees and they begin dropping off the branch like a snowstorm. Even then, however, they are not in a defensive mode and unless you actually get one between your hand and the tools you're using, they won't sting. I had about 8,000 of them buzzing around me when I caused the branch to bounce and was stung only twice because I was careless.

With Larry inching the cherry-picker up close to the office wall, and my raising the bucket to its maximum, we finally got close enough or me to gently cut the branch and put the swarm - with its queen - into a plastic bucket. Slowly, gently, Larry and I got the cherry-picker away from the office wall and lowered back to the ground without incident. (I appreciate the applause from all the bystanders.)

I placed the swarm in their new home, an empty brooder box (hive) I brought from home, and then looked for someone to go next door to Sisters Coffee Co. for some sugar to sweeten up a quart jar bee-feeder. Those poor tired and hungry ladies (a bee colony is, most of the time, an all-female organization) needed something to eat.

Debbie Newport volunteered to go to the coffee shop, and the folks over in the coffee shop sent her back with just what the bees needed.

By 8:30 p.m. all the bees were tucked safely away in their new home for the night, sipping sugar water and beginning to set up house-keeping. Sue and I drove to the Ponderosa Properties office, where I had left the hive. I blocked the entrance with cardboard so the bees couldn't get out, but still had air to breathe, loaded everything in our VW camper and trundled off to Mary and Geoff Crow's place.

If everything went as it should, when the bees went out into the sunlight the next morning they probably thought they'd died and gone to heaven; Mary has one of the most beautiful gardens in Sisters.

This all worked slicker than goose grease because Sisters is a place where people help each other. From the time Catherine heard the bees outside her wall, to when Kevin and his wife Debbie got into it, and Sharon called Sue; to the hundreds of curious bystanders, some wanting to help, it was a family effort. My thanks to everyone that helped to make 8,000 bees and this 81-year-old human feel good about life.