20k honey bees took over a tech company’s empty office during lockdown | Hacker News Reader

20k honey bees took over a tech company’s empty office during lockdown

qz.com

283 pointscodev78 comments

Cue the typical "Nature is Healing" especially because pollinators are under massive pressure due to pesticides and herbicides.

Having said that, I'm glad they called a good beekeper who was able to rescue the hive.

Also, I've heard that if you have a bee infestation in your attic for example, not to call an exterminator, but to call a beekeeper. Often these new hives are valuable to hobbyists and they are happy to come take care of it for free. There are apparently directories of local beekeepers all over the world that are fairly easy to find on a search engine.

The information about there being directories and how to handle it is amazing.

Thank you for sharing. I’m filing this away in case I ever have to deal with an infestation.

Finding a hive that can survive the winter can be a multi-year event (at least for me it was). The hive which ended up surviving came from a captured swarm

What was the cause of the deaths?

Here is usually varroa - I’m just contemplating getting my autumn treatments in, as the little horrors are actually visible on frames now. I hate them so much.

They didn't save enough honey for the winter. One year they barely survived and a week later the queen was found decapitated in the then-abandoned hive. Bees are hardcore

It is illegal to kill bees in certain situations in California. An exterminator might refer you to a beekeeper just to avoid any potential liability.

There are situations where beekeepers may not actually want to capture the hive. Like dangerous ladder work when the have is on a second or third story and only accessible from the outside.

I luckily haven’t needed to deal with this, but I do know of people who’ve “thought” they had a “honey bee” problem, but the exterminator came out and confirmed it was a “wasp” problem.

This is an area where the intent of the law is good, but sometimes the real world issues of safety of acquiring the hive is complex enough that it’s not safe to attempt, and it’s not clear the law allows for that.

(And it’s not just CA that makes it illegal to kill bees, many states have similar laws)

I recommend watching Jeff Horchoff on YouTube. He is very polite and his bee removal videos are oddly calming. I've been subscribed for a year or two now.

https://youtube.com/c/JeffHorchoff

Yes! 100% call local beekeepers when possible for an almost always free removal. A beekeeper will sometimes even PAY you so they can come move the hive.

No such luck with wasp and hornet nests though. Had to pay to have one of those removed from the siding in our house. And wow were they mad when the beekeeper started vacuuming them up.

Got talking to the guy for a while, fascinating industry. He's very nervous about the next 20 years when it comes to honeybees.

What about carpenter bees? I've seen a lot of those around lately and have been thinking about checking the roof. Do they have the same value as honey bees?

Carpenter bees are awesome, they pollinate flowers (so we can have fruits in our backyard) and have an awesome short life of minding their own business.

Sort of. We had carpenter bees in our deck one summer and they were incredibly agitated and aggressive whenever we tried to use it.

They also have a voracious appetite for Georgia Pine which happens to be the material my inlaws summer home is made from. Not to be outdone, woodpeckers also enjoy eating a carpenter bee and their babies, so we end up with holes from the carpenter bees along with a string of holes made by woodpeckers in search of said bees.

Im not really too worried about being stung by them, and I agree they generally dont want to mess with you unless you are actively messing with their burrow. I have taken to putting out sacrificial 2x4s each season that I pre-drill(3/4" holes seem to do the trick) to attract the bees to easier pickings. This helps quite a bit, but I still have to end up spraying a few holes in our siding and deck each year as it will soon be swiss cheese if I do not...

So you live inside a vegan art installation?

A couple years ago I relocated a piece of driftwood from my small backyard to the front yard because a carpenter bee couple had taken up residence in it and the male was routinely dive-bombing us in the backyard (they don't sting, but are just aggressive).

I was amazed to see that the male kept returning to the same spot for what seemed like weeks looking for its partner in the now relocated piece of driftwood. I naively had expected it to track down the piece of driftwood just 40 ft away in the front yard, and it was kind of heartbreaking to see it searching for it in desperation.

Yes! Carpenter bees are just as important as honey bees. While they don't create honey like honey bees do these carpenter bees are vital for pollination.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_bee#Ecological_signi...

In the past there were companies that would take a hornet hive for free. They'd drop it into a nitrogen filled container and sell the hornets for medical research

My memory is fuzzy on the details but that's the gist of it

how much is a beekeeper compared to an exterminator?

Here in NZ, the beekeeper is free. They may reject the job though, as cutouts of colonies are horrible.

I knew a beekeeper that would take them off peoples property for free since they could typically sell them or home them themselves - win win. I don’t think that is uncommon.

Beekeeper is generally free. Exterminator pricing varies based on locality and scale of the job.

Some beekeepers in competitive localities will pay to come remove your hive.

I called a local apiary to remove a wasp nest in the Seattle area. They charged a flat $200 for wasps, and $0 for bees.

My dad and sisters are beekeepers. They run around all year to capture swarms. First, they try to capture the queen and mark her, then keep her extra safe in a special cage. Then they have a "bee vacuum" which is basically a shop vac hooked up to a bucket, both with a really low flow rate to avoid injuring the creatures. Most of the time, it's an entertaining process and the bees are as gentle as flies.

> They run around all year to capture swarms.

There may be a difference in certain regions, but usually swarms are a spring thing, with another small reoccurrence in autumn. Mid summer is quiet and winter has none.

This relates to the times at which a queen can mate - there are no male drones in winter (the females kicked them out!) and so any queen that hatched would be a virgin, and couldn’t lay.

Sometimes swarms will occur due to bees absconding to get away from High levels of disease. I have never seen this but high levels of varroa can cause it.

The ones in the "off seasons" are usually very aggressive from what I've heard. They typically ran away from home to break away from some environmental stress I've been told? I'm not a beekeeper :) Just repeating what I've heard

This must be somewhere warms and with very mild winters?

NZ is lucky to have fairly easy going bees - this doesn’t mean that they are all friendly, just that Africanised bees are so much worse. There are accounts of them flying into smokers and putting them out. It’s all rather intense.

Kansas in the midwest. Depends on what you mean by "Mild" haha. We had snow in October, followed weeks later by 90degf temps. Very wide swings.

Our friends had a bee swarm show up in one of their trees this summer after a big storm. Their neighbor happens to do beekeeping, so he came over and helped them set up a hive for the swarm.

I think they still have the bees. Haven't heard much about it lately.

Can you elaborate on "most of the time"?

Reminds me of when a honeybee swarm occupied the parking lot behind our building and eventually mostly settled on a bike rack (this also happens to be the building of the downtown Palo Alto Philz). As a beekeeper, I was so excited that I emailed our head of ops and physical security in all caps asking if I could have them. After he called me to confirm that I wasn't trolling, he graciously offered to stand guard to keep folks away while I grabbed my bee suit to safely remove the bees and put them in a new home.

I remember that incident well and watching you comb the bees into their new home. Good times!

Beautiful

I was thinking more along the lines of a pivot for the business into a new line of AI Honey.

A few observations - I’m a beekeeper.

The brood pattern on that comb is horrible - I suspect a lot of varroa, but there are other potential causes. Varroa can be tidied up if the colony isn’t too far gone. Once it’s removed it needs to be kept under observation for a bit, and kept away from clean hives.

If it’s carrying something like American Foul Brood, it shouldn’t be spread. Here in NZ the ‘treatment’ for AFB is to burn the colony and the hive.

A colony is unlikely to die if the queen is killed (assuming it isn’t winter). They will make a new one from an existing egg.

This is a neat write up - and good on the person who removed them. Cutting a colony out of a building is a horrible, messy chore. Catching a swarm is very wary in comparison.

Edit: one more thought, comb is white, then it goes yellow, then brown and finally black. This is from use, bee feet and the cocoons that are inside each cell.

That process takes time, usually a season of two at least. I retire my comb at about 3 years old.

That comb looks quite black - I think it a been there for more than a season (dead bees noticed in April).

You have to burn the colony and hive? Wow thats disturbing

Yeah, it’s horrible. I haven’t had to do it. NZ rules here. https://afb.org.nz/

Edit: Some info. You are required to register any apiary (group of hives) and it’s location after a short duration. You are required to inspect it at least once per year and report the results to the agency.

If anyone gets AFB you are required to notify the agency and destroy the hive. A notification is the. sent to beekeepers in the area to warm them to be on alert.

We aim to eradicate AFB, and given that it’s mainly caused by beekeepers putting infected comb and equipment into hives and letting dead hives be robbed, this seems achievable.

Unfortunately we are doing much worse with this plan than we have do to date with covid eradication. It’s lucky all New Zealanders aren’t beekeepers.

20000 bees = one small hive. Doesn't make as catchy a headline of course, but just for reference.

Yeah, I read an article about an 18-wheeler that tipped over with with 1 Million bees, and I couldn't help thinking of Austin Powers! I'd be surprised if there weren't at least 5 Million.

They were always busy workers, but used too many buzzwords. The boss was too gossipy, a real queen bee type. They were pretty good at crosspollinating ideas, but the cubicles felt like cells. They liked to keep the workers in the dark most of the time. They did all feel like members of one big family, though.

I know, you're going to downvote me. I have no regrets.

Honey, why would I?

For once the space was put to a productive use.

lol I came in with the exact same take :p

This is an awesome use of VC funding that I whole-heartedly support!

Wait, let me guess... Was it the Bumble office?

You really made an account just for that?

It seems like it got 15 upvotes, so it might have been worth it.

Wait how do you tell if it got upvotes?

Click the user name, has 21 points, only made one post, ergo...

You set your time machine 6 months into the future, then the upvotes show up on hn.algolia.com.

This isn't reddit who cares about upvotes here?

Everyone.

Points help you calibrate your own behaviour to be more helpful to others in this community.

Whatever helpful means in a context.

In this case it was a funny comment well received by the community.

Funny enough, this company's office is between two Honey offices.

This happened to an empty conference room while I was working at Stanford. They noticed something was amiss when honey began dripping down the walls.

For reference, an average hive has 30k bees in it (20-50,000 if you want a range).

If it was a social media or ad tech company, I'd say let the bees have it. They do more good for society than either of the above.

I feel like there’s a perfect metaphor in here somewhere.

I wonder if they decided to go with Scrum or Kanban

Unrelated to lockdown, but I recall once there was a raccoon who made it into a third floor research lab at my former institution. Apparently it managed to find its way into a ventilation duct somewhere on the ground floor and crawl its way up.

In the early fall, I got a frantic message from my wife along with a video of something making a hell of a noise in the laundry room.

Came home unsure what I'd find, but I figured it was a small mammal of some sort. At first we figured it was something that had nestled into the laundry and was very upset at being tumble dried. Opened the drier door just a crack figuring we'd hear the thing trying to escape or at least snarling at us.

Nothing.

Determined it was in the dryer vent.

I had converted from the normal flexible dryer hose to a solid metal tube the year before because I heard it was more efficient and we were having some issues with our clothes drying.

(Ended up being lint build-up. Clean your dryers out folks. I had cleaned all the obvious spots, but there was heat shield that was completely caked with lint and effectively acting as a hot pad keeping the warm air from getting to our clothes)

Anyway, proceeded to take the dryer duct apart, figuring it was a mouse or something. Every so often we'd hear the thing start moving around, so I'd kick the dryer on for a second to keep it from going into the blower and trying to get out that way.

We were trying to rig up something to catch the mouse in when we finally did get it to come out the open end of the dryer tube. It's a tight space so that was easier said than done.

Ended up accidentally disconnecting the end of the tube that connects to the dryer while we were fiddling and figured the mouse had escaped into our house.

Heard whatever it was moving around in there still, so I kicked the dryer on to dissuade it from leaving the tube from the wrong end.

Heard a big noise, and all the sudden a bird comes shooting out the pipe. About shit my pants and took off running up the stairs. My little 3 year old son had been down there at the time and I didn't realize. He started screaming, which I felt real badly about.

Was trying to figure out how we would get a bird to peacefully leave our house. I assumed it wouldn't leave willingly.

Crept back down the stairs, and there was a little house finch, sitting on the inside ledge of the window in our entry way. It looked at me as if to say, "I want to be out there, please."

So I opened the door and he flew right on out.

Always fascinated with bees. The swarm behavior, individual unit, and produced goal. The hive. Something I came across is how they regulate heat within the hive. And also how they collectively raise their body temperature to make it too hot inside should a wasp/intruder enter.

A 2 degree tolerance allows the bee's to survive than a wasp which enters the hive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNroEwFxh6I&t=1s

Having removed ~10,000 bees from my attic, I was surprised to learn, that they fit in a 2 gallon container. 20,000 seems like “a lot” but mass and volume, it’s really not much.

Workers don't live that long, a few months at most. It's not that surprising that a colony makes a lot of them; they're literally expendable, at least individually.

I’m always amazed at how quickly animals and insects can setup shop. I’ve experienced this a lot in commercial buildings.

At my current office, we’ve had crows peck through the roof twice.

Try getting rid of a wasp nest. They will rebuild daily in the exact same spot and it's tough to get them to move on (and you're usually not as polite as with bees)

At my house I used to have about 5 new red wasp nest under the soffit every year... Very easy to get rid of with that wasp spray that goes 15-20ft if you catch it early.

Before the pandemic, I worked in a building that had a wasp problem. It was not uncommon for a wasp to fly out of the heating vent and hang out in my office.

That would be a good enough reason for me to work from home.

As always, there is a relevant xkcd.

https://xkcd.com/1439/

5k honey bees (as estimated by the beekeeper who rescued them) took over one of my trees during the lockdown.

Despite being just a few feet above a sidewalk, they didn't harm anyone.

A beautiful sight, first time I've ever seen a peaceful swarm up close, hope it's not the last.

They were trying to transition to becoming CloudBees... but that name is already taken.

Wow I would not want to be in charge of that cap table.

I like this stonk.

Unreadable site.

Bees?

Gob's not on board.

How are all of you reading this article? I get a paywall.

Unbeelievable!

Modern-day honeypot?

Aight imma head out.

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