Gardener calls professional to deal with group of peaceful bees

When most people happen upon a thick cluster of honeybees dripping like golden grapes from a tree branch, their first impulse is usually to get as far away from the swarm as possible.

But bee trapper Barry Webb has a different take. He prefers to shake the tree as hard as he can.

Now, it should be noted that Webb has been capturing and transporting bees for more than three years, and that he wears a bee-keeper helmet and elbow-length rubber gloves when he rattles the bees off their resting place. And he knows that once the queen bee has been plopped into a waiting cardboard box, the rest of the bees will follow her.

Tuesday afternoon, Webb had a chance to flex his bee-trapping skills at the Benton County Courthouse, after he was contacted by county landscape gardener Rod Jarvis. Jarvis had discovered the bees earlier in the day, when he was mowing the lawn.

“Les the barber saw them,” Jarvis said, and came down the street from his barber shop to warn Jarvis that he’d seen them swarming above the lawn. For awhile, they formed a dense cloud in front of the courthouse.

“At one point, you had to stand back here,” he said, a good 10 yards away from where the bees had settled.

Jarvis was worried that the bees would end up attacking a passerby.

“You know the cartoon thing when they’re chasing someone?” he said, his head filled with images of bees swarming in the shape of a sledgehammer as they followed a victim down the street.

However, by the time Webb arrived, the bees had not stung anyone and were calmly clustered around the branch of a Japanese maple tree in the front of the courthouse lawn, right at the spot where anti-war protesters gather every night. It could have been a dangerous mix, which is why Jarvis wanted the bees removed as quickly as possible.

“I don’t get too allergic to them,” Webb said as he moved comfortably next to the bee cluster. Webb, a carpenter by trade, was just coming back from a job site when he was contacted by Jarvis, who found him through OSU Extension Service.

Webb first sprayed the swarm with a “top secret” non-toxic spray to keep them calm, and then laid a painter’s tarp under the bush, aiming the tarp like a funnel into a cardboard box.

After donning his gear, he shook the branch as hard as possible, and the bees dropped like cut grape clusters into the box, with only a few hundred flying free to swarm around his head.

Because the queen fell into the box, the other bees, focused on her pheromones, headed straight for the box, too. Within a few minutes, most of the bees had climbed inside, and Webb was ready to transport them to one of his hives at home.

In all, he captured around three pounds of bees, which equals around 10,000 bees, he said. And because of their loyalty to their queen, he figured he’d have no trouble placing them in a hive.

“They all march in there like a sea of lemmings,” he said.

With hope, they’ll survive the honeybee viruses and mites that seem to have been killing local honeybees in the past few years.

“I’ll give them a spot to be,” Webb said, “where people aren’t.”

To find Webb, contact the Extension Service at 766-6750. To contact the Willamette Valley Bee Association, which also humanely removes bees and transplants them to hives, call 503-364-3275.