A war brewed Tuesday morning. Thick smoke plumed through the air, and two men suited up into their uniform: a white jumpsuit, orange gloves and veiled hats.
Their challenge? An 80-pound beehive exploding with about 40,000 bees.
“Hey, I’m a little scared,” Mark Snellman said, joking to his colleague Iam Hedendal, both of whom are beekeepers. “This is for sure our biggest.”
In reality, the hive and the bees inside weren’t actual adversaries to Hedendal or Snellman. Rather, the two are committed to ensuring the bees stay alive — just somewhere else.
On Tuesday, Hedendal, 42, the owner of Florida Honey Bees, and Snellman, 29, the owner of East Coast Sprayers, responded to a call about a massive hive in the Spanish River Church parking lot in Boca Raton.
The hive, about 5 feet long, nearly resembled a rock or shell you might collect from the beach with slabs of varying heights and intricate crevices. But unlike an ocean find, this hive was significantly larger, and it sat atop a mahogany tree at least 20 feet in the air.
Hedendal and Snellman spent almost two hours going up and down a bright green crane, using knives to cut off pieces of the hive and placing them into buckets as well as using a specially designed bee vacuum to suck the striped flyers into other buckets made to store and transport them.
Whether animals are capable of expressing emotion in the same way humans do might be debatable, but the more the two men cut away hunks of the bees’ home, the more they buzzed about, with Hedendal taking 20 stings to the hand.
Hedendal has owned Florida Honey Bees, an ethical bee removal and relocation service, since 2020, and he said he has removed about 600 hives during that time.
He owns 160 hives, which he keeps on bee yards in Lake Ida, but he sells excess hives to people interested in becoming beekeepers, too. He’s sold about 200.
“I’m not saving people from beehives, I’m saving the bees from people,” he said.
The buzz about bees
In South Florida, animals are in abundance, making it likely that residents will encounter a variety of critters in their homes from alligators and iguanas in pools to cockroaches, spiders and lizards crawling on walls.
Bees are, at least in Hedendal’s experience, no exception. Some days, he said he will work from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. juggling unrelenting calls about unwanted colonies.
What makes a good place for bees to build a new home?
“Bees want safety from weather, access to food and water, and room to grow,” Hedendal said.
Florida as whole is a marvelous place for bees to thrive because the climate creates year-round opportunities for bee pollination.
“Anywhere in Florida, there is always an abundance of things flowering,” he said. “Nectar is so abundant.”
Bees’ source of pollen collection could be anything from mango to citrus trees. No matter the season, the happy bees can keep expanding.
“Bees don’t want to go out to pollinate when it gets below 58 degrees, but it doesn’t get below 58 degrees in South Florida very often,” said Willie Sklaroff, or “Willie the Bee Man,” as he is more popularly known.
Sklaroff said he finds hives most commonly inside tree trunks, but he’s seen them on buildings, inside forlorn car tires, in mobile homes, inside concrete poles, on cargo ships, in upside down flower pots and even highway billboards.
In the early 2000s, honey bee colonies experienced significant declines in part to a condition known as Colony Collapse Disorder, when most worker bees disappear, leaving behind the queen bee.
The disorder is linked to pests, diseases, pesticides, pollutants and more, but in recent years, the United States has seen an “upward trend in pollinator populations,” according to research from the United States Department of Agriculture.
“We went from 460 beekeepers in Florida to now we’re over 4,800 beekeepers,” said William Kern, a University of Florida associate professor for Africanized honey bees and urban pest management at the Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center. “We’ve gone from 150,000 hives in 2007, 2008 to now, we are at 600,000. So essentially we’ve had a 400% increase in the number of bee colonies in Florida.”
And those numbers only account for managed bee colonies, not feral colonies like the one dismantled by Hedendal and Snellman on Tuesday.
In 2019, Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade county officials took the initiative to set up apiaries, or places where bees are kept, to increase bee populations across the region.
Regardless of how many bees exist in Florida, Hedendal wants no part of extermination, saying he works to remove and relocate 99.5% of the bees he handles.
So, what might be wrong with extermination?
Ethical removal vs. extermination
Most are likely familiar with the popular Save the Bees movement that gained traction when global bee populations were experiencing greater declines, but why the stress over such a small, stinging creature?
“Pollination is a big thing for all bees,” Sklaroff said. “When a bee pollinates a mango tree, you’re going to get more mangoes on it. And so pollination is a big thing for fruit and vegetables.”
More than 130 agricultural crops are pollinated by bees in the U.S., many of which are then consumed by people.
Despite this, Sklaroff exterminates most of the bees he gets calls for, but does relocate about 10% of them, he estimated.
“It doesn’t hurt Florida to get rid of unwanted bees that are in people’s houses,” he said. “A lot of people want to save the bees, but a lot of times they could have viruses or diseases, and you can’t save them, and other times, like right now, it’s just way, way too hot to really save the bees.”
Public safety is another reason why extermination might be chosen over relocation, Kern said.
“If you have a feral colony … in a highly active area where there’s lots of people around, probably the safest thing would be to go in and to kill them as quickly as possible,” he said.
Each situation is different, Kern said, with some calling for extermination while others are better suited for relocation.
“If you have a colony, say, on school grounds, you don’t have any choice, you’re going to have to kill them because if you do try to do a live removal, you’re going to have lots of bees flying around for several days,” he said.
In the spot where the Spanish River Church hive sat before its Tuesday removal, bees remained flying around the area well after Hedendal and Snellman finished the job.
Luckily, the parking lot was vacant.
‘A healthy respect’
Hedendal and Snellman may have rendered the bees at Spanish River Church on Tuesday morning homeless, but they are still quite passionate about ensuring they are safe from death.
Before driving his bee-ridden van away to another call, Hedendal recalled the 1991 movie “Pure Luck” during which one character swells up in size after being stung by a bee.
Like the 1975 movie “Jaws,” media may be influential in shaping how people view animals. But Hedendal and Snellman do not want people to fear these honey makers.
“Bees deserve a healthy respect,” Hedendal said.
