Last week we had a bumblebee queen who thought it would be great to set up her nest in the deck right under our back door. So every time we went out on the deck (to barbecue, make repairs, or even just walk around) first one then a few more Bumblebee ruffians would start menacing us. If we didn’t need our back deck it would be fine — Bumblebees relocate every year so if we could just avoid the area then next year the bees would be gone. But to make a long story short it’s hard (and not enjoyable) to avoid the back deck and the back door. Which was creating a problem for us.
In theory, we could gas* the bees. This is legal and depressingly easy.
But bumblebees are not wasps. In addition to being generally harmless they are pollinators, which I feel like we need today more than ever. Plus they are shockingly intelligent, as these headlines from Smithsonian Magazine demonstrate.
What to do? Larissa learned that Bumblebee nests can be relocated. Yay!! We started calling beekeepers, but it turns out beekeepers are generally busy and not available to relocate the nest any faster than the bees will eventually relocate themselves which wasn’t going to work for us. I found myself reaching out to one beekeeper, who’d say they were busy but reach out to this beekeeper, who’d say they were busy but reach out to this beekeeper, who’d say they were busy but… After two days of fruitless calls I realized I needed to find another avenue.
So I started searching for Bumblebee relocation companies. But it turns out that this was just a fancy way of saying “Exterminators.” The encouraging news is that several exterminators I talked to decline to poison pollinators, but the discouraging news was I was not finding anyone who could actually relocate a hive. First one call. No luck. Then a second call. No luck. And on and on. On the sixth call I found luck. NORTHWEST BEE REMOVAL would relocate the bees.
Turns out relocating bees that are nested under the deck isn’t so easy. Because in a nest like that they actually tunnel into the ground, and unless we had the ability to magically relocate the ground beneath our house to another location, that wasn’t going to work out. In this instance, relocation involved putting on a bee suit, vacuuming up the bees and the queen with a special vacuum cleaner, and then physically releasing the bees in another place, then putting a non-toxic power at the nest entrance to discourage new bees from taking over the nest. “Bumblebees are smart,” we were told. “They’ll know to establish a new nest in the new location so that the hive can resume.”
There’s that amazing scene in Lord Of The Rings. Where one of the hobbits wishes Gollum would just die, but where Gandalf reminds him that we should not be so quick to kill when we ourselves are not able to bring life. That’s how I personally feel about all life (except wasps and mosquitos): I just hate exterminating something if I don’t have to, especially when they are something so important like pollinating bees.
So, it took a surprising amount of phone calls and persistence, but in the end we found someone who could save the colony and give us our deck back. This is money well spent.
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