Honey bees come and go on a recent morning in June, buzzing around a crack in the siding of a stone house built in 1920.
They’ve built their hive beneath the floorboards of an upstairs bedroom in Dan Tarwater’s south Kansas City home. Tarwater’s the caretaker of the Veterans of Foreign Wars post next door. He says the bees aren’t a problem, but it’s time for them to go.
To do the job, Tarwater called Dan Krull, a local beekeeper who volunteers at Manheim Gardens in Midtown. Krull keeps hives on the urban hillside there.
“Last fall, the bees moved in,” Tarwater says. "They’re going to take the hive out, extract the bees alive and move them up to north Missouri.”
Krull says his approach to beekeeping is a little different than most. Too often, beekeepers intervene with sprays and pesticides to prevent infestations of common bee parasites like wax moths and hive beetles, he says — interventions can weaken bee colonies.
Krull takes a more Darwinian approach.
“Bees have been on the planet for 120 million years prior to humans, and they don't need our help,” Krull says. “When we approach beekeeping from that mentality we reduce the amount of interventions that we do."
"Because we understand that they're an organism with its own evolutionary context that doesn't need people,” he adds.
Through the company he co-founded, Good Oak, Krull keeps more than 100 hives around Kansas City, and he’s always looking for bees on the move.
On warm days in early spring, Krull gets a lot of calls from concerned homeowners who have spotted swarms of bees clustered in trees. Now that swarming season is over, he’s on the lookout for the swarms that got away, like the one inside Tarwater’s floor.
Source: stlpublicradio.org
Photo Credit: pexels-pixabay
Categories: Missouri, General