A cantaloupe-sized swarm of bees flew into a five-foot bush surrounding a palm tree at the corner of Antioch and Swarthmore on April 6. Yellow police tape soon cordoned off the area, but after five days of walking past the corner with the bees still in residence, a Palisadian-Post reporter decided to contact LAPD to find out their next step. LAPD had not placed the tape and didn’t know about the bees. Officers suggested that the Post contact L.A. County vector control, which then transferred the reporter to the agriculture department. A receptionist said one person handles bees in the county and he was unavailable. A message was left. Realizing the county’s sole beekeeper might be overwhelmed, the Post also contacted Backwards Beekeepers, a group of Los Angeles organic, treatment-free beekeepers. Member Ruth Askren quickly responded and said she would come to the Palisades. Two days later, Askren and Palisadian Harlan Hogue removed the bees. Askren explained that when a beehive gets overcrowded, a group of bees break away, taking a virgin queen with them. They fly to a new location and wait for the queen to fly out, mate and then return. Once that happens the swarm seeks out a new hive location. ‘Some swarms will stay in place for two weeks or maybe even start to make a comb,’ said Askren, who graduated from Palisades High School and is now an art teacher at Notre Dame Academy. Askren called the Antioch/Swarthmore bees ‘homeless’ and said that it is easy to collect swarms because they are waiting for the queen to mate and return. ‘Homeless bees will not sting,’ she said, ‘unless they feel threatened.’ Hogue and Askren placed a nucleus box near the swarm, shook the limb the bees were on and they fell into the box. ’They fall onto one another,’ Askren explained. ‘Once the core mass is in, they all go in. You can see them marching in as a single file. They are like a single organism; a bee by itself is dead.’ It takes about an hour for all the bees into go to a box, but Askren and Hogue didn’t have time to wait for foraging bees to return, so they left a shoebox with a small piece of honeycomb inside to capture the stragglers. They also sprayed vinegar and water on the branch where the swarm had been situated, which discourages bees from returning to that location. When Askren returned two days later, she was surprised to find the shoebox gone. Catherine Faris, who works at nearby Elyse Walker, said that she saw two Palisades teens, a male and female about 14 to 16, pick up the box and walk off with it. Faris asked them to put it back, but they ignored her. ‘Someone had a surprise when they opened that box and found it full of bees,’ said Askren, who was given a small box by Faris and then brushed a few remaining bees into it. She planned to reunite those bees with the original swarm, which she had placed near an existing hive in a nearby canyon away from residents. ‘They can only live two days and a night in a nucleus box,’ said Askren, who also speaks about bees to elementary schools. ‘I love going on rescues. You capture a swarm and can help someone set up a new hive. ‘There is a real issue with bee colony collapse, which is decimating the bee population,’ Askren continued. ‘Einstein said, ‘If there were no bees, we’d have about three years left before we died of starvation.” Visit Backwards Bees at www.beehuman.blogspot.com or call their bee rescue hotline (213) 373-1104.
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