7th October 2025
…that is the question. And it’s a question we are getting asked over and over again. It’s a positive sign of Pollards being a good natural environment, but it brings its challenges.
The roads of Barbados are littered with signs saying ‘WE MOVE BEES’ followed by a phone number. Many small outfits offer to tackle wild hives by smoking the bees to make them drowsy, then capturing the queen. The rest of the hive is programmed to follow her wherever she goes, so the entire hive can be successfully moved to a safe location. In theory this service can be performed gratis, as the bee mover gets the bees, comb and local honey, which is much prized and commands high prices. Plus more can be produced from the captured hive. In practice the market is full of charlatans who charge an arm and a leg and don’t know what they’re doing half the time.
Readers with long memories may remember ‘Breakfast in the car’ from nearly a year ago, when we sadly decided to blast a small hive because it was in a tree just outside the kitchen window and the bees were a danger, inflicting a couple of stings. Well, the blasting simply pushed the bees a short distance into the beautiful old flamboyant tree about fifty yards away:
Before long they were up to their old tricks, and although we avoided getting stung again, they kept coming into the kitchen in numbers to drink from the tap and flying into the house at night, drawn by lights. Not ideal, and we had to cancel a couple of social occasions here as a result.
After lengthy consultation with our pest controller Joel and declining a couple of laughable quotes from the aforementioned charlatans, we reluctantly accepted that the hive was too deep inside a hollow tree branch and couldn’t be moved. We are very much aware of the critical importance of bees to the world’s ecosystem and would only ever consider exterminating a hive as a last resort, so we very reluctantly asked Joel to take care of them for us, which he did, blocking a couple of holes in the tree and sustaining a couple of stings for his trouble – an occupational hazard. He drew our attention to a very large branch with a gaping hole in it, advising us to have it removed. Not being in possession of a huge chainsaw, we tried to find a tree surgeon but ran out of time before leaving the island.
So, naturally, when we returned in August there was a massive wild hive in the hollow branch of the tree 🙄. We have co-existed happily with these new bees, each community leaving the other in peace, no kitchen invasions or stings. Doing our little bit for the planet (to be fair the bees were doing all the work). Then last week our gardener Jason got spooked by the hive and summoned his bee man Aaron. Trusting in Jason’s judgment we agreed to Aaron’s very reasonable quote to move (not destroy) the bees. He came along last Saturday.
Well. I’m not sure Aaron would have quoted what he did if he’d known the day he was in for. Donning his sweltering bee suit, he assembled the scaffold helpfully left by our roofer, charged up his smoke puffer and set to work. Seven hours of puffing, probing, drilling test holes along the branch and then chainsawing repeated slices off it, scooping out honeycomb and huge handfuls of bees later, he was done. And done in. Having declined all our offers of food, he was running on empty. We found him resting his head on the bonnet of his car. The car battery was also running on empty – it wouldn’t start. Not for the first time it was Nicola to the rescue with her trusty jump leads and he was finally on his way home.
Even then the job wasn’t finished. The queen and all her court were in Aaron’s big yellow mobile beehive at the foot of the tree. Their temporary home. He was too exhausted to take it home so he returned on Sunday after dark when the bees had all returned from their day’s work commuting back and forth from their new home drinking nectar and doing their wonderful cross-pollination thing. Taking no chances, this time he was driven by his daughter in her little hatchback. He took a bin bag from our kitchen, popped the mobile hive into it, and they drove off with thousands of bees in the boot – by no means all in the box! What a lovely supportive daughter 😦. Aaron thinks the branch may be hollow all the way to the bottom of the tree. Obviously he couldn’t saw all the way down there or there’d be no tree left, so he had to seal the huge hole with fine mesh and block the drilled holes with our expanding foam! Here’s hoping it all holds together.
With luck this is the best outcome for everyone:
Aaron gets the hive for his apiary
We don’t have to worry about the bees turning rogue
The planet is saved!
🐝 🐝 🐝 🐝 🐝
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