Hana Hou: Hive Minders
When there’s a swarm of bees in your neighborhood, who ya gonna call?
Story by Martha Cheng. Photos by Jenny Sathngam. Original post at Hana Hou.
With their bee vacuums and protective jumpsuits, Kai Hudgins and Kailin Kim could be confused for exterminators—or even Ghostbusters—but their mission is to protect what they capture, not destroy. Case in point: About a year ago the pair was called for help with a colony of bees that had moved into the Bond Memorial Public Library in Kapa‘au, on Hawai‘i Island.
It was during the height of macadamia tree flowering season, and the bees had been, well, busy. Their hive—inside a wall near the library’s ceiling—was so full of honey that when Hudgins cut into it to remove it, the honeycomb’s wax-capped cells broke open, spilling golden, sticky syrup that oozed underneath the legs of the ladder he was standing on. It slipped. He grabbed at the wall trim, but it broke off and he fell backward from more than ten feet up, trapping his foot and breaking bones in his hand as he reached out to prevent hitting his head on the floor. And yet Hudgins and Kim continued to get the bees into a box on the roof. Having already taken apart the hive, they couldn’t leave the bees homeless. “When you’re in the middle of it, you can’t just stop,” says Kim.
Bees have a habit of making their homes in our homes—in walls, ceilings, laundry rooms. They also, like us, seem to really like hot tubs. But they’d just as soon build their wax palaces and raise their young in a Waimea horse stable or a 136-year-old church steeple in Kohala, both on Hawai‘i Island; or in the Hawaiian Hall of O‘ahu’s Bishop Museum as well as a satellite dish six thousand feet up the slope of Maui’s Haleakalā. And that’s when bee rescuers like Hudgins and Kim are called—or at least they hope that they, and not the exterminators, are called. Because these bees are all we have in the Islands. On the Mainland you can simply order bees online and have them shipped to you. But bee imports have been banned in Hawai‘i since 1908. The fear is bee diseases, pests and the Africanized honeybee, a.k.a. the “killer bee,” which is far more aggressive than the ones we have in Hawai‘i. Our honeybees were introduced in 1857, and the first hives were established on O‘ahu, in Nu‘uanu, which is why there’s still a sign at the Pali Lookout that says, “Beware of BEES During High Wind.” Beyond producing honey, bees are considered the most important of the insects that pollinate up to a third of our food—in the Islands, that means macadamia, lychee, avocado and more.
Kai Hudgins and Kailin Kim have been rescuing bees on Hawai‘i Island since 2016, under the company name Ho‘ōla (“to save, heal, thrive”). They relocate bee colonies from locations like libraries, churches and homes to their property in Kohala.
Not every beekeeper is a bee remover. While beekeeping can fall into a routine of care similar in its way to managing livestock, bee rescuing is more like roping feral cattle: subject to the whims of swarms and calls from panicked people. “Anybody who does bee removals, they’re a little nuts,” says Hudgins. “There’s a wildness to it.” In case they need to rescue bees at a moment’s notice, Hudgins and Kim usually pack their truck with a bee veil, a hive smoker and pine needles to burn in it, a queen clip (for capturing the queen bee) and a tube of sting relief.
Hudgins says he used to be allergic to bees until one day, after so many stings, he just wasn’t. At the University of Hawai‘i-Hilo, Kim majored in Hawaiian studies and minored in agriculture—she had taken an apiary course on a whim because it was one of those fun classes everyone recommended. She hadn’t planned on raising bees, but one day about four years ago she and Hudgins came upon a hive in a water meter box. They moved the bees to their backyard and found the process fascinating—how a relocated hive went from chaos to organized chaos, how a cloud of bees in the air and piles of bees on the ground found their way into a tidy box once their queen was in place. Finding the queen was a Where’s Waldo hunt among thousands of bees, looking for one with an elongated body and bald back (sometimes queens are also encircled by bees that orient toward her). Once they located the queen and moved her to the new home, the rest of the bees literally beelined to her. Having now relived this process countless times, Kim, who met Hudgins on a statewide sail of the replica Polynesian voyaging canoe Hōkūle‘a, says, “We always relate bees back to canoes and navigating—how they travel as one, how they navigate by the sun into the unknown. It all relates back to wa‘a [canoes] for us.”
Maui’s Ryan Anderson became a beekeeper and bee rescuer at the same time. About a decade ago, when bees had moved into a friend’s kids’ playhouse, he decided he would get them out. He acquired a bee box, wrapped himself in fabric, put on a pair of goggles and lifted the top of the plywood bench in the playhouse. The comb immediately collapsed and the bees were angry. “I stopped counting after thirty stings,” he says, though he guesses he was stung between fifty and a hundred times. “But I had to finish. I felt like the life of that colony was in my hands. If I ran away, that whole thing would have turned to mush—the cockroaches and ants would have taken over, and everything would have died. I told myself through each one of those stings, ‘I’m going to make it through this.’ When you get stung by a bee, instantly there’s an emotional trigger that comes up. … It’s a flight-or-fight response. What I really learned to do on that first removal was to contain that response a little bit, to take some deep breaths.”
He sifted through the sticky mess for intact pieces of comb and secured them with rubber bands in frames, which he then placed in the bee box. The comb contained eggs and brood, and the rest of the bees eventually made their way into the box to take care of their young. He never found the queen—he suspects he accidentally killed her when the comb collapsed—but within hours the bees raised a new one and settled into a new order. In the years since, he’s learned to take hives apart more delicately, which he’s done everywhere on Maui from a church in Hā‘ena to a thirty-foot-diameter satellite dish on Haleakalā.
Anderson has also learned that when bees are looking for a new place to live, they waggle. When a colony gets too large for its hive, the bees swarm; more than half of them leaving with the queen to temporarily settle somewhere close. Scouts survey cavities, looking for spaces big enough for a new colony, with flowering plants nearby and protected from the wind and rain. If they find a good prospect, they return to the swarm and do a waggle dance, signaling the suitability of and directions to the new space. Other scouts check out the site, and if they agree, they join in the dance. When enough scouts agree, they lead the swarm to its new home.
The process of relocating bees varies from high-tech to hands-on. Kailin uses a thermal camera to determine the size of a hive, like this one behind a horse stable wall. After exposing the hive, Kai and Kailin look for the queen bee and collect honey from the capped hive cells.
Anderson finds this behavior fascinating. “They’re totally selfless. They act intuitively for the benefit of the super-organism that is the bee colony. That’s a whole lot of heavy words there, but if you look into it, everyone’s working for the benefit of the whole. Nobody’s saying, ‘Nah, I don’t want to do that.’ That’s not in their vocabulary. They simply agree with each other. I can only imagine if our political system was like that.”
Swarms are easy for bee rescuers. They’re the equivalent of firefighters retrieving a cat in a tree—maybe even easier. Having left the established hive in search of a new residence, they’re not protecting their homes or larvae, and so they’re more docile. Tens of thousands of them can hang like a clump of magnetized paper clips from tree branches or fence posts. Kim has brought her oldest son, now four, to every swarm catch—you can scoop the bees like water or shake a ball of bees from a branch, and they will drop like dew from a leaf. Kim once accidentally dropped a swarm from a tree into her boots. Sockless, she let some of them crawl out and then slipped the boots off and simply poured the rest into the waiting bee box.
It’s removing the established hives—the ones that require cutting into the walls and ceilings of homes, schools and churches—that the rescuers remember the most. Hudgins and Kim once retrieved roughly eighty thousand bees from the steeple of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Kapa‘au. In the roof, leading all the way up to the steeple, the bees had built twenty feet of comb, some of it so old and petrified that Hudgins had to pry it out with a crowbar. They estimated the comb to be more than a hundred years old—a piece of it still sits in their freezer, as hard and black as flint. (Fresh comb is soft and a pristine white—older comb darkens from so many bees’ feet, like well-trafficked carpet.) When Hudgins opened the roof, the bees flowed out, and he chased them through the church cemetery. He eventually captured them, and when the bees had been moved to the couple’s apiary, they named the new hive Elvira, for whose grave the bees landed on.
Caring for bees is more a calling than a vocation for Jasmine Joy, seen here at her Beelieve Hawai‘i apiary in Waimānalo, O‘ahu. “My apiaries aren’t just bee yards, they’re sanctuaries,” she says. “These were all wild bees — we have a symbiosis and become very connected.”
As bee rescuers on O‘ahu, the state’s most populous island, Syreen Hostallero and her husband, Pooya Motlagh, undertake the most urban of removals: from a helicopter propeller at the Pacific Aviation Museum; beneath a car bumper at a dealership in ‘Aiea; at Diamond Head Theatre, on the outskirts of Waikīkī. These juxtapositions between wildlife and the built environment fascinate Hostallero. In the beginning, she and Motlagh had simply wanted bees for their 1.5-acre property in Mākaha. So they accompanied Ken Harmeyer, who operates the Hawai‘i Bee Hotline, for a live bee removal—and that opened up a new world. “I never knew it was possible for bees to move into houses and start building inside walls,” she says. “I thought they just made honey.”
Hostallero and Motlagh often rehabilitate rescued bees on their property, and even on their lānai. Just as for humans, the moving process is disruptive to bees—it can take up to a year for them to produce honey again, so honey retrieved from buildings is often used to feed weaker hives. At any given time, Hostallero and Motlagh are foster parents to between 60 and 150 rescued hives—the number fluctuates with the seasons, hive health and pests—in their apiaries spread across the island.
Prior to taking up bee rescue, Hostallero had worked as a server in restaurants for most of her life. For a time, she also sold containers for a packaging company. In 2010, she says, she had a spiritual awakening. “I realized how many plastic containers I was selling. I wrote myself a letter saying, ‘I want to do better for the Earth. I want to do what’s right in whatever job I take next.’” It was around this same time that she met Motlagh, who had an interest in beekeeping. Harmeyer now forwards weekday calls to the Hawai‘i Bee Hotline to the couple. “I just love being around them,” Hostallero says. “It’s like when I worked in the restaurant industry: When you take care of a table, you anticipate what they need next. When I take care of these bees, I can kind of anticipate what they need. I’m still a server but now I’m serving the bees.”
