Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Belmont bees
Belmont bees
A bee problem in the Oakesdale area turned into two boxes of bees for the WSU Entomology program this week.
In the past two years, the family of M.K. Sisak noticed a population of bees flying around a second, old house on their property off Highway 27. They started spraying around the location once a week before noticing the siding bulging out on the old house last summer.
This year they noticed more bees and decided to call WSU.
Last Thursday, June 27, Kenny Sunderland, a business student and former animal sciences major, arrived, and he and Sisak began taking the siding off one wall of the old house.
With a wooden box to put the bees in, a smoker device and a pry bar tool, Sunderland and Sisak began to remove siding.
A metal teapot-like can, the smoker device, uses pine needles to emit smoke, which short circuits the bees’ alarm pheromones, calming them so they are less likely to sting.
While the two men worked, bees buzzed and hovered. Their numbers were more than Sisak and Sunderland expected.
Eventually, Sunderland and Sisak pulled off boards lined with honeycombs.
The goal of the extrication was to get the queen bee to fly inside the wooden box and the others would follow.
The bees remained in place, however, in the early going.
“Bees move into cavities. They just happened to find a cavity in that wall,” said Jason Long, a graduate student in entomology who arrived after Sunderland, along with Sunderland’s brother Kroft. They brought another box.
Removing more boards, Long and the Sunderlands discovered three layers, called sheets, of honeycomb.
Inside the two 16x22x10 boxes, called Langstroth boxes after its inventor, the bee movers put a sample of larvae, eggs and pupae - the stage between larvae and adult - and then a dose of queen bee pheromone to draw the bees inside.
“The healthier and stronger a queen bee is, the more (pheromone) she puts out,” explained Long. “Bees think a strong queen is there and they go into the box.”
As of Friday, most of the bees had done just that.
Long said that the Langstroth boxes were left on site over the weekend to collect any stragglers. Kenny Sunderland was due to pick up the boxes Tuesday to take them back to campus.
There are between 210 and 220 colonies at WSU, Long said.
He described a colony as “a queen and a whole bunch of bees.”
He said the colony found in Oakesdale was similar to what he’s seen before.
“I’d say it was 30,000-40,000 bees,” he said. “It was decent size but it wasn’t massively huge.”
Long said the university program is happy to have the new bees.
“It gives us another colony to work with and it gets it out of (the Sisaks) hair,” he said.
He said the bees set up a colony there because they found a hole, indicating there was an entry gap in a top two-by-four on the wall of the house.
Long is one of three WSU graduate students in the bee program.
His current research regards indoor wintering projects, which has to do with getting bees through the winter in a healthier state.
To do that, his group is testing how much carbon dioxide bees can tolerate without negative impact. The purpose is to try to reduce how much they need over the winter, since carbon dioxide tends to lower bees’ metabolic rate.
In turn, if the research succeeds, keeping bees over the winter for commercial beekeepers would require less food.
Long said the bees retrieved from the Sisaks will be used, depending on hygiene tests, either for breeding stock or to be given away to a hobbiest.
“We work with them and see how they like getting worked with,” said Long. “We don’t like getting stung a lot when dealing with bees.”
While keeping so many colonies, the WSU bee program produces 10 to 15 50-gallon drums of honey each year. They sell a lot of it to Ferdinand’s ice cream.
“Now all we need is a good contractor,” said Mrs. Sisak of the siding repair project ahead.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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