Los Angeles abuzz about push for urban beekeeping

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — For the past three years, Rob
McFarland has kept a beehive filled with 25,000 bees on the roof of his
house smack in the middle of West Los Angeles.
The bees occupy
some prime real estate — they even have a view of the Hollywood sign —
but for now, they are illegal squatters in the trendy neighborhood of
bars and eateries near Santa Monica.
On Wednesday, the City
Council will vote on whether to begin the process of granting bees like
McFarland’s legal status in LA’s residential areas after a lengthy
lobbying effort from bee lovers of all stripes.
"LA has an ideal
climate and a ton for bees to forage on and is emerging as a real
epicenter of urban beekeeping, but ironically, it’s not legal here,"
said McFarland, who formed a group called HoneyLove.org to advocate for
backyard beekeeping.
The vote comes against the backdrop of colony
collapse disorder, a worrisome die-off of honeybees that has captured
the attention of environmentalists and farmers worldwide. Cities from
New York to Denver have in the past few years legalized urban beekeeping
to encourage local agriculture and boost the health of the bee
population.
The push, however, has alarmed some, who fear such an
ordinance could bring more residents into direct contact with the
Africanized, or "killer bees," that are already thriving in walls,
trees, electrical boxes and compost bins.
At the heart of the
debate are a new breed of urban beekeepers who rescue those wild bees
from extermination and relocate them to backyards — and almost all of
these hives have some "killer bee" genes mixed in.
Critics of the
practice fear a blanket legalization of backyard bees would allow these
self-styled "ethical bee removal specialists" to expand their efforts
with dangerous consequences.
"To just haul them (feral bees) out
of the fences and stick them in the backyard, that’s not a good idea,"
said Eric Mussen, a bee expert at the University of California, Davis.
Killer
bees fully colonized Los Angeles County by 1999 and have almost
completely pushed out the existing wild bee population. The bees can
attack when an intruder gets closer than 100 feet, can chase a person up
to a half-mile and will remain aggressive up to an hour after an
attack, according to the county.
Those who work with feral bees insist that the concerns are overblown.
Feral
bees in Los Angeles do have some African genes, they say, but the
danger has been diluted from years of interbreeding with local,
non-Africanized bees. The resulting hybrid hives can be managed easily
with proper training, common sense about hive placement and good
communication with neighbors.
There are already around 10 feral
hives per square mile in Los Angeles, so moving them to backyards where
beekeepers can monitor them makes sense, said Ruth Askren, who maintains
hives for 22 clients and has relocated wild hives to backyards all over
the city.
Beekeepers like Askren estimate that 10 percent or
fewer of the feral hives they relocate are so aggressive they must be
destroyed.
"If we really had serious Africanized bees in LA, people would be chased down the street every
day," she said.
Africanized
bees are also hardier than their European counterparts, which are used
for commercial pollination, and could help counter colony collapse, said
McFarland, the rooftop beekeeper. He and others who work with feral
bees say unlike European bees, their hives don’t need any chemical
treatments to keep them healthy.
"We need them. We need to
preserve what’s clearly a superior bee. They’re the ones that are
surviving," he said. "My opinion is that they’re a blessing in
disguise."
Feral bees have also sweetened the pot for an emerging
niche business: Some beekeepers-turned-entrepreneurs have recently
started companies to remove unwanted wild hives, relocating them to
backyard bee boxes and then harvesting rich honey that can sell for $110
a gallon to wealthy foodies obsessed with local ingredients.
Some
customers even want honey made by bees in their specific neighborhood
because they believe that eating honey made from local pollens will
combat allergies.
Tyson Kaiser’s business, Sweet Bee Removal,
charges $125 an hour for a hive extraction and once made $5,000 over
three days removing a massive feral hive from a tile rooftop in one of
LA’s ritzier addresses.
In the past year, Kaiser estimates he has
removed nearly 200 hives and swarms; he currently has a network of "hive
hosts" who keep excess feral colonies on their property in exchange for
half the honey they produce.
On a recent sunny day, Kaiser
checked on a feral hive he put on a resident’s roof last fall. Dressed
in a full-body white bee suit and a zippered hood with a mesh face mask,
Kaiser carefully opened the hive as bees buzzed around him and traffic
whizzed by two stories below.
When he was done, about a dozen
agitated bees followed him from the roof, down a ladder and into the
residents’ house before they gave up the chase.
"There are people
who think we’re crazy for what we’re doing," said Kaiser, who’s been
keeping bees for three years. "But they’re afraid that new beekeepers
dealing with feral hives are going to tarnish the image of the
established beekeepers."
Regardless, urban beekeeping is happening
every day under the city’s radar and controlling the rapidly growing
hobby is better than turning a blind eye, said Martin Schlageter, policy
director for Councilman Jose Huizar. Huizar supports the bee ordinance
and has introduced a motion to encourage the city to avoid destroying
feral hives when possible.
"There’s greater awareness of the
crisis with bee populations generally and the importance of these
pollinators," he said. "People want to … social network freely about
this and give tips to likeminded folks and they don’t want to feel like
they’re going to be caught out for breaking the law."
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