Orphaned downtown bees rescued by an unlikely saviour

Originally published  Here  Toronto Star

By CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS  Staff Reporter
Mon., June 20, 2016
They were outcasts. Homeless runaways, shunned by their kin in midflight from their native land.

About 200 bees, exiled from their hive, buzzed bereft of heart and home near a fire hydrant they mistook for a bee hotel at Yonge and Eglinton last Thursday.

Out foraging and scouting for new real estate when the bulk of their migrant swarm flaked off with a beekeeper earlier in the week, the leftover worker clan clung to the sidewalk and waited, hoping for their relatives to come and whisk them away in a return that never came.

Enter a saviour. Nima Alizadeh, imbued with the power of social media and a Good Samaritan mindset, responded to posts about the bees on Bunz Trading Zone, a popular Facebook trading group.

A member had tacked up a photo of the uptown insects dodging dogs and the Godzilla feet of commuters. Other Bunz-ers perked up with “Save the bees!” pleas.

“I thought, ‘What the hell, I’m going to go try,’” said Alizadeh, 23.

The welder, fusing pluckiness and compassion, pulled up to the northwest corner of Yonge St. and Eglinton Ave. W. by bike around 8:30 p.m., cardboard box in hand.

First he tried picking them up one by one. Then he tried group-scooping the thorny nuggets.

A nearby security guard volunteered that he was “crazy.” Another lent him a pair of gloves.

“They weren’t stinging,” Alizadeh said of the grateful bees. “They would crawl on your hand and just buzz around.”

Soon he had all 200 clumped in a corner, as he documented the mission in real time with photo updates on Bunz.

Then he walked the boxed bees home with his bike, thinking: “I don’t know what I’m doing.’”

Luckily the hive mind kicked in. Another Bunz bee buff, Roger Sader, suggested Alizadeh drop them off near his place in Parkdale.

So he plopped them in the passenger seat of his car, “seat-belted them up” and drove across town to deliver the bees to their salvation.

The timing couldn’t have been better for Sader, who had just returned from southeast Lebanon, where he was helping his brother manage the family apiary.
Sader had bought a hive of about 40,000 bees for use on his friend’s farm north of Vaughan. But he could always use more, so when his nephew spotted the Bunz post, he leapt.

“This is perfect!” he exclaimed.

“It’s a good family bonding experience … I have a little daughter and my nephews, and it’s a really good way of socializing, rather than watching a movie.”

Sader, who hopes to have hives buzzing on his downtown green roof within a year, plans to transport his newest honeycomb kids to the farm Tuesday. There they can roam the hexagonal halls of their fresh digs, free from dog paws and people feet.

They need to move fast; without access to the pollen and honey stores a hive provides, the little workers will wither.

“If everything’s right in the bee world, their new roommates just accept them,” said Paul Kelly, research and apiary manager at the University of Guelph’s Honeybee Research Centre.

Too many could cause friction, but 200 is a small addition to a colony of tens of thousands. Kelly noted the bees might well have died out in days if not for the rescue.

Alizadeh, for his part, has received public praise and private thanks in posts and messages over the past few days.

“I like bees. I know that they’re important to our food sources, and I know they’re struggling in the last few years.”

Back in the car Thursday night, sensing a buzzing sound, he checked the cupholder. There scrambled a lone bee, fluttering under the dash lighting.

“I put the car in reverse and got it right back to its buddies,” he said. “It felt wrong to just drive away with one bee.”

All about bee breakaways

Bees break off from their hives and light out for a new home for several reasons.

“It could be that it’s too congested,” says Toronto Bee Rescue founder Peter Chorabik. That’s the main one. “It could also be they just don’t like their home, or it could be that they’re sick.”

The process — called swarming — is typical in the life cycle of every hive. “It’s how the bees spread their genetics.”

Generally, the worker bees elect to up and leave, taking the old queen with them. A new queen then establishes her dominance back at the original digs, while 15,0000 to 30,000 of her kin take flight from their native land.

During migration, it’s not uncommon for a few stragglers to be left in the dust, with some bees always away foraging and scouting at any given time.

“A bee colony is like a super-organism,” says Chorabik, whose organization rescues about 15 swarms a year (Chorabik himself has 120 bee colonies — more than 4.8 million bees). “A bee can’t survive when it’s on its own; it can only survive when they’re together,” relying on the collective pollen and honey stores for nourishment.

Canadian beekeepers reported a loss of about 200,000 colonies during spring 2013. But the numbers are on the rebound, with a burgeoning urban beekeeping movement keeping the key pollinators in constant supply