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10,000 bees bring out the police crime tape

With armed backup, the bee guy scoops a swarm bare-handed.

By ALEXANDRA ZAYAS
Published March 21, 2007

TAMPA - Outnumbered 1,666 to one, a half-dozen Tampa police officers stood watch behind yellow caution tape and decided to call for backup.

An old cream-colored pickup truck arrived three hours later, toting a rusted ladder, pieces of rotted plywood and old boxes.

Enter Ken Stack, the bee guy.

A woman had called police about 1 p.m. Tuesday after she saw 10,000 bees swarming a palm tree outside the AMF Florida Lanes bowling alley on Florida Avenue north of Linebaugh Avenue.

The officers feared someone using a nearby bus bench would be swarmed and stung. What if those were the killer bees they heard about on the news?

So they threw up a string of yellow tape and debated whether to close a lane of Florida Avenue traffic.

No need to block off the street, the 64-year-old beekeeper said. Those aren't killer bees.

They were honeybees, the world's most important pollinators - "integral cogs that make this world tick," he said. His wiry gray eyebrows wiggled as he spoke.

These bees looked like they were traveling, he said. And he knew exactly where to look when he heard there was another hive inside a tree trunk at the carwash across the street.

Stack scanned the ground around the original hive for green exoskeletons of drones, to see just how old it was. It was an established hive, he determined.

Some bees must have left the crowded hive, swarmed across the street, and set up on another palm tree. "It's like a base camp," he said, his eyes widening behind big metal-rimmed glasses. "Bees are going out on scouting parties, looking for chambers."

"I culminate their mission," said the slender man whose fascination with insects won him the nickname "Bugs" as a kid. "They're doing reconnaissance, looking for a chamber. I'm going to give them a furnished apartment."

He donned a hard hat and constructed a new home for the bees out of the old boxes, still drenched with the scent of the many bees it has kept before. "Watch how easily they'll accept it," he said.

He covered his face with a yellow net and crossed the police line, pumping a smoker full of pine needles to distract the bees. With his bare hands, he gently scooped bees from the tree and dropped them in the box.

"There's not a bee or wasp in the world that's aggressive," he said. Just don't swat at them, he added. They may sting you, leaving a pheromone in your skin that their friends would "home in on like a Sidewinder missile."

Without a sting, the bees bumbled into their new home in the contraption he made out of plastic crates and boxes.

Two hours after they settled in, they would travel in Stack's pickup truck to Wesley Chapel, where they would live in his yard or get passed on to fellow bee enthusiasts.

Stack has been doing the same thing for 25 years, defending the reputation of his favorite insects and finding them new homes. It's his vocation, he said. "I've got a screw loose for it and a passion."

Alexandra Zayas can be reached at (813) 226-3354 or azayas@sptimes.com.

[Last modified March 21, 2007, 06:08:04]