Occasionally, though, Missouri’s official state insects make their homes in inconvenient places. One local beekeeper is known for stepping in to help.
Honey bees come and go on a recent morning in June, buzzing around a crack in the siding of a stone house built in 1920. They’ve built their hive beneath the floorboards of an upstairs bedroom in Dan Tarwater’s south Kansas City home. Tarwater’s the caretaker of the Veterans of Foreign Wars post next door. He says the bees aren’t a problem, but it’s time for them to go.To do the job, Tarwater called Dan Krull, a local beekeeper who volunteers at Manheim Gardens in Midtown. Krull keeps hives on the urban hillside there.
“Bees have been on the planet for 120 million years prior to humans, and they don’t need our help,” Krull says. “When we approach beekeeping from that mentality we reduce the amount of interventions that we do.”
“Because we understand that they’re an organism with its own evolutionary context that doesn’t need people,” he adds. Through the company he co-founded, Good Oak, Krull keeps more than 100 hives around Kansas City, and he’s always looking for bees on the move.
On warm days in early spring, Krull gets a lot of calls from concerned homeowners who have spotted swarms of bees clustered in trees. Now that swarming season is over, he’s on the lookout for the swarms that got away, like the one inside Tarwater’s floor.
Krull estimates these bees have been here for at least a season or two. After several hours of careful work, he says it’s been a successful day.
“We found exactly what we were hoping,” Krull says. “We’ve exposed a very healthy hive full of tons and tons of honey.” Krull estimates the bees have stored about 30 pounds of honey between the floorboards. “This is about as good as it gets,” Krull says. “It’s beautiful. Lots of honey. Lots of healthy bees.”
Now that Krull’s captured the colony, he’ll be taking the bees to a former tobacco farm in Weston, Missouri, where he keeps 50 hives on a restored native prairie. Krull calls it bee heaven.
Excerpted from KCUR | By Julie Denesha. Published June 23, 2023 at 4:00 AM CDT. Read full article here: https://www.kcur.org/arts-life/2023-06-23/a-kansas-city-beekeeper-is-finding-safe-new-homes-for-missouris-state-insect-to-bee
