Beekeeping remains an essential service
WASHINGTON» “Excuse me, can I ask what you’re doing here?” a resident in a southeast Washington neighborhood asks as Sean Kennedy and Erin Gleeson get out of their truck and scour the streets.
The sign on their back windshield, “Bees Onboard,” gives them away.
Kennedy, 58, and Gleeson, 36, are beekeepers. They and their colleagues have been deemed essential workers by the District of Columbia government in the middle of a pandemic.
On this day April, the pair is responding to a phone call about a swarm of honeybees. At first glance it appears as if it might be a bad tip. Kennedy looks down a fence line while Gleeson walks across the street and past a few houses.
“Let’s check the alley,” Kennedy says, and quickly they’re back in their truck. The truck moves slowly as they scan fences, trees, and rooflines — all places where bee swarms might stop.
As they reach the end of the alley, they find what they were looking for: a dark mass about 2 feet long that most casual observers would walk by without noticing. Upon closer inspection, this brown mass moves with quiet activity, thousands of bees huddling with no nest to protect them.
Within two hours, this cluster of bees will be collected, driven across town and given a new home on some of the most desirable real estate in the city.
If a hive is thriving and becomes too large for its own space, the queen will take half the hive and set off to find a new location to start a new hive. If this swarm isn’t collected up by a beekeeper, the new hive can settle into backyards, attics, crawl spaces, office buildings or high traffic public spaces, creating a nuisance that can alarm some people.
“Bees are not aggressive unless you invade their home or step on them,” Kennedy says. “But they do put people off. Some people are just innately afraid of things that sting and maybe that’s primal and necessary, but if you have them in your office building or you have them in your tourist spots, they become a problem”
For the past five years, the D.C. Beekeepers Alliance has responded to calls from residents about bee swarms.
Last year the group responded to just 12 calls; this year has been especially busy.
“We had on the first swarm call day of this year, as many calls as we had in all of last year,” says Toni Burnham, the group’s president, who estimates receiving calls so far about 60 to 75 swarms.
The coronavirus outbreak coincided with the start of warmer weather, when bees naturally begin separating from their hives. When district officials began looking at the possibility of shutting down the city due to the outbreak, Burnham reached out to her contact at the D.C. Department of Energy & Environment.
“Beekeepers needed to be essential because often the hives that they keep are not on their property,” says Tommy Wells, the department’s director and a former member of the City Council. “So, they need to be able to travel and get to their bee colonies.”
Back out on the street, Kennedy and Gleeson collected their swarm in a specially designed white cardboard box. The box hums and vibrates as they load it into the back of their truck next to their bee suits and tools. They make their way across town though light traffic in record time.
Jacques Pitteloud, the Swiss ambassador to the U.S., opens the gate to the embassy grounds.
Pitteloud says he was working with the Audubon Society of America to turn parts of the property into a biodiversity reserve when he was approached about beekeeping. “I said, ‘Of course.’ ”
Collecting swarms of bees is challenging at any time, even more so during a pandemic.
“Being around a swarm of bees deters a crowd. You don’t want a lot of people gathering and it sort of creates a dynamic that encourages social distancing no matter what’s going on with pandemics in the world. So, it’s a perfect activity to encourage social distancing,” Kennedy says.
He says beekeeping has helped him combat boredom. “There were a lot of swarms this year and it gave life for the last few months some purpose,” he says.