‘Just don’t kill them’: Hong Kong beekeeper Harry Wong on the importance of urban bee conservation
Hong Kong Free Press
Spring was particularly hectic for Hong Kong beekeeper Harry Wong. As flowers bloomed and the temperature rose, bees were busy restocking food and forming new colonies.
It also marked the beginning of bee migration season, meaning the insects were more likely to appear in urban areas and come into contact with humans on their journey.
On a morning in late March, the 35-year-old had just finished work at his beekeeping facility when he got a notification on his phone. A volunteer from his bee rescue team informed him that someone had requested assistance concerning a large swarm near the window of a housing unit. It was urgent, they added.
Wong immediately contacted the rest of the team to see if anyone was close to the site and could offer help. But while he was waiting for replies, the volunteer sent an update: “No need, the relevant department has been contacted. They were in a hurry.”
The co-founder of conservation group Beetales was unsure what happened to the insects. His guess was the bees had been exterminated, per the usual practice of disinfestation services in Hong Kong.
“I blame our slow reaction and our failure to widely disseminate information about protecting and not killing bees to the general public. I feel saddened by this,” Wong wrote on Beetales’ Instagram account. The caption appeared alongside a photo of what appeared to be hundreds of bees congregating in a corner before being killed.
A similar situation happened several weeks later. Wong once again missed the chance to relocate a bee colony from a pedestrian sidewalk to Beetales’ urban conservation centre. Instead, some personnel from “another department” arrived at the scene, he said. They were already “washing the ground” while Wong was trying to assemble a team of volunteers to help, the beekeeper wrote in an Instagram post in April.
In Hong Kong, the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (FEHD) handles bee and wasp disinfestation in public areas. The fate of bees found in private or public residential premises depends on the tenants or the building management companies. The government’s general enquiries website suggests contacting private pest control companies if assistance is needed.
Beetales is offering an alternative.
It has been almost four years since Wong began practising beekeeping and advocating for the conservation of bees in urban areas. Before apprenticing with local beekeepers, Wong was already no stranger to interacting with the insects. The former arborist told HKFP in an interview last month that he often encountered bees when he was inspecting trees, but that they were considered an obstruction to his work.
It was common practice for arborists to spray pesticides to get the bees out of the way. But Wong later realised it was not the best way of handling the insects, which act as an important pollinator and help sustain food production globally.
In lieu of extermination, which can wipe out a swarm in roughly 10 minutes and directly reduce the bee population, Wong and his volunteers can spend up to several hours on relocation work. They began by collecting the honeycombs and guiding the bees into a large container for transportation, followed by finding the queen.
Locating the queen is crucial to saving the bee swarm, Wong said, as the queen is the only one that can reproduce and sustain the colony.
Once the queen is spotted, the rescuers capture it and put it inside the container. The rest of the bees will follow by tracking the smell of their families. Once they have the swarm in their care, Wong and other rescuers examine the condition of the hive and scout the area for any suitable spots to release the bees back into the wild. It is essential to find somewhere relatively far away from people, he said.
If there is nowhere ideal for wild release, the bees are taken back to Beetales’ conservation centre.
In some cases, the rescuers scoop up batches of bees with their bare hands. Other times they rely on tools such as a fluffy makeup brush to gently and slowly guide the bees into the container.
“We want to provide an option for the public that imposes less harm on nature,” Wong said.
Beetales operated in a rural area in Yuen Long for nearly two years before moving into an industrial building. With a roof over their hives, the bees recycled by Wong and his team are protected from extreme heat and rain. The beekeeper has also installed instruments for data collection, which allow him to better monitor and understand the insects.
The windows of the industrial unit were kept open to allow the bees to fly in and out of the wooden boxes they reside in to find food. But high temperatures in recent months has affected flowering patterns, and some bees were unable to find sufficient food.
Wong checks on the conservation centre’s eight colonies at least once or twice a week and feeds them homemade pollen paste if needed. If the bees are not well-fed, different colonies may fight one another over food, he said.
Apart from rescue operations, Wong also conducts workshops for companies and schools to teach people how to handle different types of bees. He estimated that there were more than 100 species of bees found in Hong Kong. A wasp handbook published by the FEHD said there were some 75,000 species of wasps recorded around the world, at least 30 of which could be found locally.
Some workshops involve showcasing daily products that contain ingredients related to bees, such as soap, lip balm and mead, which help people realise how their lives are interconnected with bees.
“We are trying to change some really deep-rooted concepts about bees. We hope that more and more people will accept bees in the future,” he said.
The beekeeper told HKFP that it is not uncommon for people to see a swarm of bees outside their window at home. Most of the time, the bees are simply passing by and taking a rest. People can ignore the bees as long as they are not building a hive, Wong said.
The more urgent situations would involve wasps or hornets, which most people see as aggressive or dangerous. While fear was understandable, Wong said some wasp attacks were triggered by people’s lack of understanding of the insects, causing them to react in a way that agitated the insects.
Bees that appeared in people’s homes were likely “lost,” Wong said. He advised opening the windows wide and keeping a distance from the bee, adding that it would leave after it had calmed down and figured out its original route, Wong said.
Beetales is working to actively raise its profile so that private property management companies will choose to contact them instead of the authorities or pest control companies when they encounter a swarm of bees. Wong admitted the group still had a long way to go, as most management companies still saw their process as slow. The most straightforward solution in their eyes was to apply pesticides, Wong said.
Asked if he felt disheartened over the failed attempts to rescue bees before they were exterminated, Wong said he did, but he also recognised it was the reality he was pushing to change.
“You don’t have to like bees, just don’t kill them,” he said.
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