A sweet year for honey bees

You could say that Mike Metz has been as busy as a bee this summer.

“I’ve got my hands full this year,” said Metz, who operates Seven Hills Honey in Port Washington. “It’s been crazy all summer.”

He’s already harvested about 4,000 pounds of honey, a number he said is probably a low estimate — “And I’m not done yet,” Metz said, noting that unlike most beekeepers, he tries to capture fall honey.

He’s also been busy removing honey bees from places where they aren’t welcome, such as the north side of the Ozaukee County historic courthouse in downtown Port, where last month he removed a colony of about 60,000 bees from an exposed hive 35 to 40 feet above the ground.

Honey bees are important pollinators, and this year has been an exceptional one for the bees, Metz said, beginning in spring, when warm weather arrived earlier than usual.

“A lot of colonies survived the winter,” he said. “It was unusual how many survived. And they came out strong.”

This year’s drought added to the craziness, he said.

“Drought actually assists in ways you wouldn’t think,” Metz said.

Nectar doesn’t get washed off plants, so the bees have more food than usual, and since there isn’t as much dew, the nectar is more concentrated.

In addition, it’s less moist, so the bees don’t have to expend energy drying it, something they do by fanning it with their wings.

“They’re filling their home up and running out of space so quickly,” Metz said, and that signals to the bees that it’s time to move on. At that point, about half the hive leaves with the queen to hunt for a new home — and it’s not always a place where they are welcome.

Take, for example, the Ozaukee Masonic Center in Port Washington, where a colony moved in. Metz, who is a Mason, was called to assess the situation in June.

The bees, he said, set up a home between the red brick facade of the building and the Cream City brick that makes up the structure.

The only way to remove them, Metz said, would be to tear the brick off.

“Without demonstrably damaging a historic building, it can’t be done,” he said.

Metz, who said he doesn’t know how large the hive is, said the best solution is to wait and hope they die off over winter, then seal up the building.

“If they don’t (die off), we’ll just have to live with them,” he said.

Exterminating the bees, he said, isn’t a good solution. If you kill them at the wrong time of year, you could be leaving as much as 150 pounds of honey behind — honey that in hot weather can drip into the walls and create a mess  or in cold weather can provide food for other animals.

“You’re better off letting them die naturally,” he said, noting they will starve after consuming all the honey. “Then all that’s left is the wax.”

A few weekends ago, Metz was called to Drew’s True Value Hardware in Port when people noticed bees swarming in a tree near the driveway on the north end of the parking lot. He moved an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 bees to a hive he placed on Port’s north side.

And in perhaps one of his most visible colony removals, he tackled the hive at the historic courthouse.

Those bees, Metz said, were unhappy to see him.

“They were twitchy,” Metz said of the bees, noting he was stung 30 to 45 times while removing the colony. “They got me pretty good. They were very, very mean.”

It was a four hour process that required him to go up in a lift while wearing full protective gear on a hot summer day, he said.

The colony had probably been there six to eight weeks, he said, and had hatched two broods during that time.

He did not find the queen, nor did he find any young eggs, Metz said. He only found one hole into the building, but there weren’t many bees inside, so it’s likely the queen died.

When removing a hive, he uses a vacuum system to remove the bees and then place them, along with some of their comb, into a new hive.

“It’s time consuming and meticulous work,” he said. “There’s not too many people who do it.”

After a colony is rehived, it takes about a year before they settle down and produce more honey than required to survive the winter, he noted.

Metz has about 100 colonies of bees he keeps on private properties in four locations in Washington County and 11 in Ozaukee County. Most of the sites are rural, usually farmland, although there are some semi-urban locations, he said.

The bees, he said, travel about 1-1/2 miles a day when food is plentiful and as far as nine miles when it isn’t.

Of his 100 colonies, which Metz estimated have 6 million to 9 million bees, 40 were in colonies that survived last winter. He bought another 25 colonies, and the rest were those he captured or removed.

It’s a far cry from when he started working with bees in 2011 as a small-scale hobby. He went from one hive to four, then 11, 25 and later 50-plus colonies.

“This, I think, is the most hives I’ve ever had at one time,” he said of the 100 he cares for today.

The business is a side hustle, he said, but the reward is in the doing.

“This is my passion,” he said.