SACRAMENTO, Calif. — You’ve probably noticed more bees this year thanks to all the rain this past winter and the warm spring.
“We're very well pollinated this year,” said Daniel Schoenthal, who runs a honeybee rescue group called Blue Green Horizons.
He’s the guy you call when you need to move bees.
“The Sacramento Valley almost always has a surplus of honeybees. As far as we know, this is the only place in the world where that concentration happens,” he said.
Typically, he gets a few hundred calls a year to relocate bees. This year, his call load more than doubled.
“The difference between 2022 and 2023 was about a 280% increase. We had 2.8x more swarm calls and what does that mean? That means we have a lot of bees. A lot of people saw bees, a lot of people have bees living with them now,” he said.
Schoenthal says there aren’t enough old hollow oak trees for the bees to live in, so he's busy removing them from homes, water meters, chimneys, compost bins and barbecues.
"But there's reasons that bees go into those places. One, carbon is an attractant to them,” he said.
Calls for swarms in new home developments are also high this year. While having a surplus of bees can be great for the environment and our food, Schoenthal says it's a double-edged sword because beekeepers can’t get to all of them.
"The biggest issue we have is structures… the hole left in the wall from the satellite cable in your garage wall. Bees want a one to five-to-10-gallon space,” he said.
He says it's important to maintain the waterproofness of your house; fill all the little holes. If you see bees, the best thing to do is call a beekeeper.
Over the years local beekeeping clubs have started tracking swarm calls and they created a list of people you can call to remove those bees. Click HERE to find a beekeeper in your area.
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