Here's a sweet bee story and video to start the week on an uplifting note...
Jeff and Julie Russell are a super cool couple with a shared passion. They have rescued millions of bees from people’s homes since 2006. They give their rescued bees to friends, taking them to a bee paradise in San Diego, California.
People call them in when bees are discovered at a home. They always have a new strategy for every situation. One good strategy that really works is placing the queen in a box and her bees follow her inside.
These people LOVE bees… as Jeff says, “these guys are so cute… I want to save them all.”
They also want to show people how hardworking the bees are. When bees build honeycomb inside something, that just tells other bees that it’s a great place to live. And since bees work very fast, the home owner needs to call the bee guy right away to have them removed.
Here is the 5:42-minute video by The Dodo so you can meet Julie and Jeff and see how they go about their bee rescues:
Once you open up a hive, you get thousands of really angry bees because you are disturbing them in their new home and they are busy bees, hard at work. They’d like to pretty much kill you, as Julie says.
Jeff has probably been stung a thousand times, he says. His reaction to bee stings is that they are not bad at all. Your body kind of gets used to it.
He smokes them to calm them down, then takes apart their beehive and gives them the message that they’ve got to move out.
Most people just kill them and then remove the honeycombs. Jeff and Julie were some of the first people to start doing live bee removals. They are bee heroes, because they want to save bees instead of seeing them as a nuisance and killing them.
Clearly bees cannot live in peoples’ homes, but instead of killing them, be humane and call your local bee removal people. They can be found everywhere and anywhere. Julie and Jeff have saved about 6,000 hives, which is about 90 million bees. That’s pretty amazing!
Bee rescue is their shared passion. Once they take the bees to their friends, on open land in safe territory away from people, the bees settle down undisturbed.
According to scientists, bee populations are declining for several reasons like climate change, pesticides and viruses.
People should understand that bees are not just another little “pest” to kill, they are vital to our environment and they are responsible for about one-third of our food supply. As bees move pollen from flower to flower, they help flowering plants to spread out their genetics and survive.
Jeff and Julie want to change people’s perspective about bees, so people see bees as cute and useful rather than something to be scared they will get stung by. Bees are so loyal to their little hive and to their queen and family, it’s all about helping each other. They are the most fascinating of creatures, and the more you know about them the more you love them.
If you enjoyed this video and love all sorts of animals, consider following The Dodo and also follow Jeff and Julie, mr.mrs.beerescue.