Honeybees Do Not Need to Be Saved
I noticed the first bee as my dog gleefully chased it around the house. Minutes later, another bee buzzed at a window. Then a third in my kids’ room.
When I heard a loud droning coming from inside a wall next to my son’s bed, the ominous situation hit me: The house was infested.
In early April, the start of “swarm season,” honeybee colonies search for places to build new hives. A small gap in the roof gave them access to our attic — and put us on the honeybee real estate market.
Over the past two decades, fears of a collapsing honeybee population have inspired elegiac journalism and 30 U.S. state laws aiming to protect pollinators. In Washington, where I live, the DC Beekeepers Alliance notes that it is “illegal for pest control contractors to spray honeybees.”
The next morning, my husband and I started working the phones, to much disappointment. One exterminator finally agreed to come by. When he arrived, he said he would not touch the bees but knew a contractor who would commit illicit bee murder. We declined.
I considered buying a can of bug spray, but I felt too guilty. I had a vague sense that honeybees needed saving. One neighbor suggested we call a beekeeper.
We contacted a dozen beekeepers. Every one of them told me the same thing: Our problem was too small.
When a colony is looking for a new home, it sends out a few hundred “scouts” to find options. When a scout likes a place, it returns to the hive and performs a “waggle” dance that tells its brethren how far and in what direction they need to travel to find the potential home. The more vigorous the dance, the more a scout likes the location. Eventually, the thousands of hive dwellers vote.
Apparently, scouts were sizing up our home. There was little else to do but wait and see if the colony would choose us. The beekeepers said to call them when we saw a few thousand bees.
What I wish I had known then: Honeybees do not need saving. In March, new U.S. data showed that the number of honeybee colonies has increased by 31 percent since 2007. A vast majority of those insects are used in commercial farming, carted from state to state to pollinate crops.
“The fact that honeybees are domesticated and managed negates the possibility of being endangered,” noted a 2023 report from the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.
Also, honeybees are an invasive species, brought to the United States from Europe. Saving a colony can hurt native bees, many of which are endangered. A recent study in Montreal found that when the number of honeybee hives rose there, the number of native bees declined.
Left on our own, we cobbled together a plan to make our real estate seem unappealing.
We tried to sequester as many of the honeybees as possible in the attic. It was better if they did not leave, the beekeepers had said, so they could not go waggle to their friends.
Two beekeepers gave us their blessing to kill the honeybees that had made it into our house, suggesting a vacuum. Within minutes, honeybees filled ours.
Bees are most active in the warm temperatures of late afternoon. We anxiously waited for a swarm to descend.
The swarm never showed. By evening, fewer bees were roaming around the house, and the attic buzzing had grown softer. And 36 hours after the honeybees had arrived, they were gone.
One week after the bees had left us, a neighbor posted online that bees had taken root on her deck. Perhaps, I thought, our scouts had found their new home.
“Any ideas?” she wrote. “We’d like to save these bees.”
Forget the buzz about a population supposedly in peril.