Cindy Bee was in her element: Up 25 feet, balancing on a ladder, her reciprocating saw chewing into soffit. A couple dozen bees buzzed around her head, and perhaps 50,000 more awaited beneath the wood she was cutting into.
“They’re getting pretty darn cantankerous,” she said, then quickly edited herself not to cast the creatures in a bad light. “I should say ‘protective.’ ”
Bee leaned out from the ladder and yanked away a six-foot swath of plywood, unsheathing “a teeming, pulsating mass” (her words) whose hum was audible 50 feet away.
The buzz was then drowned out as she flipped on a shop vac connected to a home-made contraption: a plywood box duct-taped to a five-gallon plastic bucket. Bee moved slowly and deliberately as she sucked up bees by the hundreds.
Her voice remained calm as increasingly irritated insects got mobile, and even as they stung her as many as a dozen times.
“Easy, easy, you rascals,” she said, plucking honeycombs from the recently opened space and placing them into a bucket. “You’ve got to slow down,” she explained. “You slow into their world.”
In all, she filled four heaping buckets with honeycombs and then cleaned out the cavern where the bees had spent several years constructing an 8-foot long hive.
The bees would go home with Bee, to become one of her 65 hives. She doesn’t see it as capturing the colony. It’s more of a forced recruitment drive.
Cindy Bee — yes, that’s her given name — is said to be the only full-time “live bee rescue” person in the state. It’s an occupation that combines carpentry skills with environmental passion and a dash of courage.
A wiry, wispy, 54-year-old Marietta woman with a Howdy Doody haircut and an earnest demeanor (you expect a “gee wilickers” will slip out at any moment), Bee is on a mission to save the environmentally vital and misunderstood honeybee from further harm.
Honeybees are responsible for pollinating billions of dollars’ worth of crops and millions of trees and bushes. But they were already stressed from pesticides and habitat reduction, she said, when the mysterious colony collapse disorder started decimating hives the past three years.
“This is one of the best things I could be doing for the environment these days,” she said. “I’m doing a service to the community at large and for the bees. They built their home at the wrong place. They need to be put in a place where they can do the most good.”
Started as a hobby
Bee’s Honey Bee Removal began 14 years ago as a hobby. After moving to Georgia, Bee, a beekeeper’s daughter, put her name on the Georgia Beekeepers Association “swarm list”: a group of volunteers who rescue bee colonies that break loose from a hive and rally around their ousted queen. This happens usually in the spring, when tens of thousands of bees form clumps on branches, fences and stops signs as they look for a permanent shelter. It tends to freak out humans, who get on the phone.
During this period, the bees are virtually harmless. Gorged on nectar, they are as docile as folks pushing back from the Thanksgiving table. Bees love to nest in tree hollows, but increasingly find refuge in man-made structures like the floors, walls and eaves of houses.
But if a homeowner has the bees exterminated, the problem has only begun, said Bee. Dead bees can leave behind 100 pounds of honey, which draws moths, beetles and mice. The wax in the hive breaks down, combines with fermenting honey and forms a “black, nasty oozing mess,” she said.
When starting out on rescues, Bee started getting calls about bees holed up inside structures. But nobody was doing live bee rescues, she said. So the new Atlanta transplant found her niche.
She works most days between March and July and sporadically the rest of the year, usually charging $500 to $600 per rescue. But she is finding more work these days at foreclosed homes, where bees have moved in after the people moved out.
Bee also gets calls from people telling her they have honeybees when they really have yellow jackets, or wasps. She has no sympathy for them.
“I have to exterminate them,” she said. “They’re pretty nasty.”
Sting as therapy
When not busy rescuing bees, Bee makes beeswax candles and processes honey — lots of it. With 65 hives, she and her bees can produce three tons in a good year.
“Everything in the hive is useful, even the sting,” said Bee, who also performs “bee sting therapy,” which is a lot like acupuncture, only performed by an angry bee, not an Asian doctor.
“My father did it for people with arthritis,” said Bee, who figures she treats half a dozen people a year and gives others bees to take home to sting themselves.
The theory is that the venom causes blood cells to race to the area, bringing healing. She treats her own painful elbow a couple of times a week. The American Apitherapy Society’s Web site lists multiple sclerosis, arthritis, gout, tendonitis and infections as conditions treated by bee stings. The therapy has not been scientifically proven to work.
‘Ambassador for bees’
Bee jokes that beekeepers have to be partially crazy: Why else spend so much time with a small creature apt to sting you?
Cindy Hodges, a beekeeper who lives in Dunwoody, said Bee is a hero in beekeeping circles for her advocacy, mentoring and demeanor. “She feels very in tune to nature. Bees are so important to the environment, and they’ve had it rough the past few years,” said Hodges. “She feels she has to be there for them. It’s her mission in life.”
Keith Delaplane, a University of Georgia entomology professor who has written books on bees and heads a $4.1 million national study of colony collapse disorder, said Bee’s name is a touch of serendipity.
“She’s a great ambassador for bees,” said Delaplane, who runs programs espousing the wonders of beekeeping and often asks Bee to teach classes for beginners. “People are apprehensive going in and she’s a good first face for them.”
Her enthusiasm is infectious. While showing off the 12 box hives alongside her small ranch home, Bee enthuses about the incredible work ethic and communal nature of her tiny charges.
“They’re my girls!” said Bee, who, along with her artist partner, Mary Margaret Dillon, owns two peacocks, two dogs, five doves and, literally, a million bees. “It’s a whole entity to itself. It’s a living, breathing entity. Each hive has its own social proclivity, its own personality.
“They can teach us about getting along. Each knows what they should do and what her job is. It’s all about the good of the hive. There’s no ‘me first.’ We have to think about each other and how we fit into the bigger picture.”
---------------------
The buzz on bees
50,000
Number of bees in a healthy hive
65
Number of hives Cindy Bee runs
3
Number of tons of honey Bee’s bees produce in a good year
33
Estimate of the percentage of honeybees that have disappeared through colony collapse disorder (affects commercial beekeepers more than hobbyists)
15 billion
Estimated value in dollars of bee pollination to U.S. crops
Sources: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Cindy Bee
About the Author
The Latest
Featured
