The Buzz of Bees Fades in Orange County

Something is missing from the background noise of life here in Orange County.

Gone is the distinctive and insistent buzz of the honeybee, once a fixture in the hum of the outdoors--at picnics, in backyards and in orchards.

The bees have fallen victim to Orange County’s housing boom.

When orange groves stretched across the countryside, wild bees and their cousins from commercial beehives were everywhere. Citrus growers, farmers and gardeners embraced the bees for the role they played pollinating their crops.

But during the 1980s, the county’s wild bee population was decimated by two mite infestations, leaving primarily the commercial hives. And now, like the orange trees that they helped to bear fruit, those bees are disappearing in the face of rapidly encroaching development.

During the 1960s, Orange County was firmly established as one of the nation’s leaders in honey production and commercial beekeeping. As of 1996, only 38% of Orange County was undeveloped, compared with an average of 61% in other Southern California counties, according to the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

With fewer and fewer choice spots left for their hives, beekeeping is facing extinction.

“We just keep getting screwed down tighter and tighter,” said Leslie Ferguson, a commercial beekeeper, or apiarist, based in Visalia, Calif.

Ferguson once had 5,000 bee colonies in Orange County. Today, he is down to 120, all in Mission Viejo. In 1988, almost 4,000 bee colonies were registered with the Orange County Agricultural Commission. Today, there are fewer than 500.

The Orange County Beekeepers Assn. had as many as 200 members during the 1980s, with 20% of them commercial apiarists. In 1999, only 50 are registered.

Beekeepers John Ford and Vinciana Passierb next week will quietly remove a cluster of 30 wooden beehives from a clearing on the south side of Riley Wilderness Park in Coto de Caza.

A complex of upscale homes, bordering the wilderness park and a stone’s throw from the hives, is nearing completion. The thousands of domesticated European honeybees inside the green boxes labeled “Vinciana’s Honey” would be a target for the ire of fearful residents.

Even though Ford and Passierb breed their bees to be docile, and the bees are essential for pollinating backyard gardens, the beekeepers decided to remove their hives rather than risk a confrontation with homeowners.

“As soon as [the complex] is built, it would only be a matter of time before people started complaining,” said Passierb, who with Ford, her partner and husband, has been in the bee business for 17 years.

“It’s sad,” said Ford on a recent afternoon, as he lovingly pulled a rack of golden honeycomb from one of the boxes and placed it in another box in the back of his pickup truck. “The bees are good.”

Commercial beekeepers like Ford typically bring in revenue by renting their hives to large-scale farmers who use the insects to pollinate avocados, almonds and other crops. The beekeepers also make money by selling the honey produced and pollen collected by the bees.

Ford has worked with bees so long that his fingertips permanently smell of sweet honey. But he is contemplating getting out of beekeeping as community resistance to bees grows and more cities pass ordinances barring beekeeping.

The removal of Ford’s bees from the park could significantly hurt some of the wildlife park’s plant life, as well as the gardens of future homeowners, said park ranger Genny McVickar.

“They’re the main pollinators,” McVickar said. “When bees pollinate, you tend to get bigger blooms and more of them.”

Indeed, beekeepers warn that if they are driven completely out of areas, the delicate balance of ecosystems will suffer.

“Backyard gardeners are going to find that there’s no pollination of their crops,” Ferguson said.

Along with development, a deep-seated fear of bees has compounded the anti-bee sentiment among residents, beekeepers say. The fear has been exacerbated in the last five years by the hysteria surrounding the arrival of so-called killer bees, or Africanized honeybees, in the Southland, they said.

The highly aggressive bees have slowly migrated north since the early 1990s. While the venom of the Africanized honeybee is no worse than that of its European counterpart, Africanized bees tend to sting en masse when disturbed.

“The hype is way out of control,” said David Marder, president of the Orange County Beekeepers Assn. and owner of Beebusters, a commercial bee removal service. “People don’t understand that just because it’s a swarm, it’s not killer bees.”

Marder once had 400 bee colonies in Orange County. He has since moved all but 17 to Northern California because he anticipates a public backlash triggered by the arrival of the Africanized bees.

Beekeepers insist that beehives and development are not completely incompatible.

Humans are actually much more damaging to bees, with insecticides and vandalism victimizing many hives, than bees are to humans, they point out.

“Honeybees are very important and beneficial to mankind,” Passierb said. “But they keep building and building and building.”