March 1, 2007
Woodsman, spare that beehive!
When the madrona tree blew down in one of this winter’s windstorms, the UW gardeners weren’t surprised. “We knew the tree was dead,” said Norm Kwasinski. “But we’d been leaving it standing because it had a honeybee hive in it.”
That’s why, when the tree finally fell, the gardeners knew they couldn’t just chop it up and haul off the wood. They wanted to save the beehive. But how can you do that without getting stung? It’s not too hard in the winter, Kwasinski said.
“We just waited for a cold day, when we knew the bees wouldn’t be very active,” he explained. “Then we took a chainsaw and chopped off all but a stump.”
They took the stump and placed it upright, adding some wood chips around the base to stabilize it.
Since then the hive has been doing fine, Kwasinski said. Though he’d rather not disclose the stump’s exact location for fear the bees might get too many visitors, he and his colleagues come by periodically to check on them.
Why go to so much trouble for one beehive? Well, it’s just the nature of gardeners. After all, Kwasinski points out, bees are the world’s great pollinators.
