Beekeepers Aren’t Just in It for the Honey

As passions often do, the urge to keep bees can strike without warning. Take Ern Shockley’s case.

Twenty years ago, Shockley, now 79, was an attorney with a busy practice in Los Angeles. Among his clients was a 90-year-old woman who believed there was nothing better for her arthritis than a good bee sting. Before Shockley could say “billable hours,” he was the proud owner of 20 hives, and hundreds of thousands of bees.

Matt Reese, 71, was smitten in the late 1970s. One day his wife noticed that their children, waiting for the school bus outside their Pasadena home, were staring up into a tree.

The attraction turned out to be a swarm of bees. The Reeses finally found a beekeeper to remove them. Afterward, the beekeeper asked if he could keep a couple of his hives in their backyard.

Reese not only agreed, but he soon had 10 colonies of his own bees, with 20,000 to 30,000 per colony.

Today, Reese is down to two colonies and describes himself as a “bee-haver.” He explained, “Hobbyists are referred to as bee-havers, not beekeepers.”

Whatever they call themselves, Southern California has hundreds of people who keep bees--mostly for fun, not profit. And lest anyone think they are in it just for the honey and the buzz, local beekeepers say they are the first line of defense in the effort to keep aggressive Africanized (or killer) bees from taking over the Southland.

The keepers’ numbers are uncertain.

According to John Hurley, apiary inspector for the Los Angeles County Agriculture Commission, residents who keep bees are supposed to register with his office, but only 41 are on the rolls. Yet there are about 100 members of the Los Angeles County Beekeepers Assn. and another 100 in the Orange County organization.

Hurley is not surprised that many do not register. The requirement is not well known, he said, “and it’s not like buying a car, where it’s automatic.”

Registered or not, professional or hobbyist, local beekeepers are fascinated by bees. They were the first “domesticated” insects, their champions will tell you. The ancient Egyptians kept them, eating their honey and using it to mummify the dead.

Reese is one of those who see local beekeepers as a defense against Africanized bees. “We who keep good, friendly European bees are essentially an early-warning system,” he said.

Because Reese is constantly studying his hives, he believes he would notice if an Africanized queen moved in. Then he would “re-queen” his hive, replacing the aggressive queen with a more docile European queen that had been mated with European drones.

Robert Webster of East Los Angeles is a second-generation beekeeper. His father, Jorge, began keeping bees in Compton in the late 1960s, at the urging of an apiarist buddy.

Father and son now run their own bee-removal firm.

They also keep about 150 hives in a Whittier bee yard. (It is legal to keep bees in the city of Los Angeles, but zoning regulations make it hard to do so on a large scale, Webster said.)

Webster, 38, is constantly on the lookout for Africanized bees.

“You keep an eye on your queen,” he said. “You mark her back [with nontoxic dye], and you keep an eye on her.”

If an Africanized bee moves in and displaces a European queen, you replace it with a mated queen guaranteed by its supplier: “You keep the genetic line really, really docile,” Webster said.

Dana Bleitz, 49, of Burbank tends thousands of bees in a canyon at the Theodore Payne Foundation in Sun Valley.

Although Bleitz buys her queens from a reliable vendor, she has a favorite source for free bees--Los Angeles Zoo.

The zoo is committed to environmentally friendly pest control, said Bleitz, who has been hired to keep an eye on its bees.

Recently, she was called in when wild bees built an enormous hive high up in the new chimp house. Clinging to specially built scaffolding, Bleitz removed 350 pounds of honeycomb, which was given to the bears.

“It was driving the chimps nuts, because they could smell it and they wanted some,” she said.

Twice a week, Bleitz checks traps that she has set up at the zoo to snare bees that might otherwise trouble visitors.

The traps are upended garden pots made of recycled paper.

She baits the traps with a few drops of citrus-scented bee attractant, and the bees crawl in through the little drainage hole in the pot.

Bleitz scrutinizes the bees she gathers at the zoo, observing their behavior and taking measurements to see if they are Africanized bees, which tend to be smaller and have other distinguishing physical characteristics.

If the bees pass muster, she may add them to one of her 20 hive boxes, perched near the top of a sunny canyon in the Verdugo Hills.

Bleitz, who never wears banana- or floral-scented sunscreen because it attracts and roils bees, has a special fondness for the ones she gathers at the zoo.

“I call them mutt bees,” she said, “because they’re a combination of everything [bee-wise] that came to California.”

Like other local beekeepers, Bleitz sees herself as a front-line fighter in the battle against the Africanized honeybee.

“You can’t stop the Africanized bee,” she said. “It’s here, but you can mitigate its presence.”

Good home and yard maintenance is one way to discourage them, she said. Unlike the European variety, Africanized bees will move into an empty can left lying in a backyard and into a flue or attic unprotected by fine-mesh screening.

Bleitz thinks encouraging more beekeeping by savvy apiarists also would help keep the unwanted bees in check.

She would like to see beekeeping allowed in more public areas, such as Griffith Park.

But Hurley doesn’t expect to see beehives in Griffith Park anytime soon, not in a community as litigious as ours.

“Liability is an issue,” said Hurley, who has spoken to park administrators about the possibility. “If [bees] are there with permission of the city and somebody gets stung, who’s responsible?”

Eric Mussen, a UC Davis Extension apiculturist, believes amateur beekeeping is down statewide as a result of some major setbacks: the appearance of two different mites that harm honeybees, and the alarming invasion of the Africanized subspecies.

“It seems to be problem after problem after problem,” Mussen said. “It makes beekeeping less fun--more work and less fun.”

The passion for beekeeping peaked, he speculated, during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when “honey was pure and sugar was poison--remember those days?”

Mussen thinks the odds are poor that more widespread beekeeping can save Los Angeles from domination by Africanized bees.

Africanized bees cope better than the European variety with the more lethal of the two bee mites, Varroa destructor, he said.

And once a hive is Africanized, it takes many generations of breeding before the offspring are as tame as the most ornery European bees.

Whether or not beekeeping is effective in controlling killer bees, Hurley said, “It’s a wonderful hobby.”