ELYRIA – Nicole Cooper had just returned home from the grocery store when she noticed hundreds of black dots all over her porch.

She turned around to ask her husband what they were, and that`s when she saw it.
“It looked like a blizzard,” she said. “Of bees.”

A beehive had filled about five feet of the inside of a tree on the tree lawn outside her duplex off Brandtson Avenue, and they were now invading the porch and creating a thick sheet in front of her home Tuesday.

The bees had been a problem since the couple moved in two years ago, but it wasn`t until recently that the swarm had grown so large.

Cooper`s husband, Christian Stehr, ran his family into the house and asked an exterminator to come out and get rid of the problem, but he learned some disappointing news.

“He told me we can`t kill these because they`re true honeybees, and they`re protected,” Stehr, 49, said.

Because of their benefits to planting crops and their declining numbers, honeybees are considered protected by government and activist groups across the country, so many exterminators won`t touch them.

On Wednesday, Stehr noticed that the swarm of bees had formed a large ball in the top branch of another tree that was right outside his front window.

“We couldn`t even go outside,” he said, while the couple`s 6-month-old girl was sleeping upstairs. “I started calling everyone I could.”

A bee expert from Homer-ville came out and removed the ball, explaining that the original hive had become too crowded, so the queen and several hundred bees left to form a new hive. The expert did not have the ability to get inside the tree, so Stehr contacted several city departments until a local arborist company was sent to cut down the tree, at no cost to Stehr.

Cooper, 20, found a beekeeper couple from Oberlin and they agreed to come out and take the hive.
It took Walter and Linda Jorgensen about two hours to get the bees out, first slicing into the tree that was lying on Stehr`s lawn and pulling out as many honeycombs as he could.

Using a smoker to make the bees believe their hive was on fire, thereby causing them to stuff themselves with honey and not pay attention to his intrusion, Walter Jorgensen fished out the combs wearing only a beekeeper`s mask as protection.

“I`ve probably been stung a few hundred times,” he said. “It`s nearing 1,000.”

Jorgensen, who runs Jorgensen`s Apiary in Olmsted Falls, said the bees had formed cells in the hive to raise a new queen. After placing the combs into wooden racks that the bees will use to create another hive and sucking the rest up into a low-powered vacuum, he`ll take the bees to several sanctuaries he has outside Oberlin.

He said some bees will return to the treelawn after having been foraging all day and won`t understand that their home is gone for about half a day.

“It takes them that long to get acclimated,” he said.

In about four days, however, Stehr will be bee free.

“It`s great,” Stehr said. “We can enjoy our lawn again.”

Contact Adam Wright at 329-7129 or awright@chroniclet.com.

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