Greg Lane inches away from 40,000 bees without gloves or a bee suit while rescuing a colony in a tree in Englewood. [DNAinfo/Sam Cholke]
HYDE PARK — There were 40,000 bees flying around in Greg Lane’s Subaru station wagon as he drove out of Englewood.
Lane, a bearded Hyde Parker in a T-shirt and jeans, runs Chicago Honeybee Rescue and is one of the very few people in Chicago who knows how to remove feral honeybee nests without harming any of the insects or their precious honey.
He said he didn’t see the need to put a lid on the box as he loaded the bees into the back seat.
“I’ll just roll up the windows,” Lane said in mid-August, peak season for bee rescues.
The bees' nest had been 40 feet up a tree in front of an apartment building on a block of South Perry Avenue. Lane spent nearly 10 hours just inches from the exposed honeycomb without so much as a pair of gloves to guard him against stings.
The Englewood job started in August with a call from an exterminator, who was hesitant to kill the hive, so he reached out to Lane.
“Normally, we would go in with a suit and dust them,” said John Glemzik of Platinum Pest Solutions, referring to a poison used to deal with bees.
“If we could save them, we wanted to, and this seemed like a perfect job. And this is such a spectacular nest that I wanted to see how it was done,” Glemzik said.
Sam Cholke explains how Lane gathers the bees:
A burgeoning fan of Lane in the niche world of bug control, Glemzik brought his camera and was busy shooting while Lane built a custom box around the hive to move it to his “sanctuary.”
The mesmerized neighbors traded bets on how many times Lane would get stung. When Lane finally descended close to 6 in the evening, the sting count was zero.
The situation got tense when a chunk of honeycomb and 300-some bees fell into the lap of Lane’s assistant, Christina Zelano, but even that prompted not a single sting.
Greg Lane inspects a hornets nest he relocated to his backyard. [DNAinfo/Sam Cholke]
100 stings
Back at his home in Hyde Park earlier this week as the season for rescuing bees was closing for the year, Lane said he does have a full bee suit that covers every inch of his body and thick leather gloves. It took him years to get to the point where he felt comfortable working without the gear.
He now is brazen enough to gently tap the bees with his bare hands and grasp the honeycomb when it needs to be cut out of a crevice with a knife.
He said he’s been stung more than 100 times since he started working with bees in 2008. He got hooked on bees after a client of his furniture-building company asked him to make a beehive.
“I would much rather be stung by a wasp anytime,” Lane said. “It can be dangerous.”
Unlike wasps, bee stingers have barbs that lodge into the skin. Those barbs are forced deeper by tiny muscles on the venom sack torn from the bee’s abdomen that injects a venom 10 times stronger than that of a wasp or hornet.
“It will affect your brain for days,” Lane said. “You will feel foggy, and it will affect organs on the other side of your body — that stuff is strong.”
But getting stung is the least of a homeowner’s worries if bees get in through a hole in the siding and build a nest.
“If you have a multiyear colony, you could easily have 80 pounds” of honey in the walls, Lane said.
He said killing the bees leaves the honey in the walls, which attracts mice, rats, ants and cockroaches, and the vacant hive is often recolonized the following spring, starting the whole process all over again.
“Most people just want it to be done definitively,” Lane said.
But it can be expensive.
Lane said it can cost $800 to $1,500 to remove a honeybee colony.
The hive from Englewood had about 40,000 bees and is now in Lane's "bee sanctuary," a network of beekeepers who don't believe in harvesting honey. [DNAinfo/Sam Cholke]
Honey is for bees
Lane is nearly entirely self-taught on bees, learning through trial and error. For now, he has a solid hold on the market, with few others in Chicago offering “restoration beekeeping,” as Lane calls it.
The colony from Englewood is now in Lane’s “honeybee sanctuary,” a network of mostly South Siders who ascribe to the same divergent school of beekeeping that Lane believes in.
“I don’t harvest honey, I don’t rob honey,” Lane said.
Honey would seem to be one of the perks of Lane’s line of work, but he said he believes the bees can’t afford to give it up if they are to weather Chicago’s harsh winters.
“I want them to have all the honey. They need their honey,” Lane said.
Most beekeepers will remove a portion of the honey and replace it with sugar syrup or other replacements for the bees to survive on over the winter. Lane said he believes the hives are healthier and better able to withstand disease if they feed primarily on the honey they make themselves.
But Lane's methods are geared toward making bigger colonies that swarm and reproduce more often to bolster the population of urban bees, the opposite of what most beekeepers want.
Still, Lane's not against other people collecting honey, but advocates a hive that opens on the bottom to minimize disruption and has none of the internal boards common to most artificial hives to encourage the bees to build bigger honeycombs brimming with more honey.
Lane said his methods also produce more honey, but he said that's not the goal of his hive design based on a style developed by a French abbot in the 1960s.
For two years, Lane has led Sunday afternoon workshops among the Plymouth Rock chickens in his backyard on building these hives that are meant to be opened only rarely.
“Opening a honeybee nest is like surgery. I do it to save colonies, but otherwise it shouldn’t be done,” Lane said.
Lane has been pushing recently for more hives in community gardens, buoyed by the idea that the hives are low-maintenance since there is no honey harvest, but bring all the benefits of pollinator insects that gardeners want.
But don’t ask to buy bees.
“I'm opposed to selling the colonies and selling the honey,” Lane said. “Feral honeybee colonies are the key to survival of honeybees in the United States.”
Lane’s workshops are more about building hives that can be populated by roaming swarms of bees looking to start a new home.
He said providing an ideal home for bees is also the best way to keep the colony out of homeowner’s walls.
Greg Lane shows off a honeybee colony in the back seat of his car after removing it from a tree in Englewood.
Greg Lane uses a French design for hives that minimizes disruption of the bees when opening the hive.
Greg Lane hosts workshops on building hives that help bees survive Chicago's harsh winters with their stores of honey intact.
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