Tracy Press

A colony of busy bees was found tucked into a wall at the downtown Opera House, and while two specialists removed the bees for transplant to a new hive, neighbors dropped by for a jar of free honey.

Mark Wetter works to remove a bee hive from inside the exposed walls of an upstairs room of the downtown Opera House on Tuesday. Glenn Moore/Tracy Press

For about a year, a colony of several thousand honeybees built their comb behind the wall of an empty office at the back of the building, unbeknownst to the landlords.

Arnold and Mark Wetter — a grandfather-grandson team of bee experts — answered the call from Opera House owner Dennis Ward that someone heard a mysterious buzzing from behind the wall.

The Wetters showed up late Tuesday morning armed with a couple of boxes and a makeshift vacuum.

They sawed away several square feet of drywall and filled the empty space with smoke from burned burlap to calm the bees into submission.

Behind the plaster hung a massive honeycomb about six layers deep, several feet wide and nearly a foot from ceiling to tip.

Bees flew from their newly lit lair and clung upside down to the fluorescent ceiling lights or flocked to two windows. A few others buzzed slowly around the room, avoiding the five or six people crowding the tiny office.

Bees that died in the flurry littered the carpeted floor.

Mark Wetter quickly set to work sucking up the smoke-subdued insects into a sealed plastic bucket.

It took the men five hours, and they charged $10 for their services.

They said what they’d get back was generations of honey-makers, which in recent years have become increasingly valuable as bees nationwide — and especially in the Central Valley — started dying in droves.

Many pest control companies refuse to exterminate bees for that reason, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

Chunks of honeycomb were handed out to neighbors who dropped by to see the work in progress. The Wetters, though, were more interested in capturing and transplanting the bees to one of their hives. Glenn Moore/Tracy Press

They surmised, too, that the colony’s pioneers must have scoped out the space through an opening around a pipe protruding through an exterior wall at the back of the historic brick building.

Regardless, Tuesday turned into moving day for the apparently yearlong tenants.

Nectar steadily dripped from the waxy combs, and a swarm of angry bees avenged the interrupted industry by stinging the younger Wetter twice on the face and at least once on his hand.

"Let’s just say there were some grouchy bees earlier," he said, his hands dripping with honey as he took a break from sucking up the annoyed insects through the vacuum tube.

Arnold Wetter, 83, has kept bees for decades, he said, on land just off Fink Road between Highway 33 and Interstate 5.

"In 40 years, I’ve never seen anything like this," he said, sitting from across the room as his son sawed off chunks of honey-dripping comb with a 4-inch knife.

Tenants and a couple of the landlord’s relatives sampled the fresh honey harvest from plastic bowls.

"Looks like this is lunch for today," joked Gene Birk, who works at Tracy Travel, down the hall and around the corner from the bees’ exposed hideaway.

The second-story room at the back of the building was stifling hot, because the Wetters, who own local pest control company A&W Bees, needed the windows closed to trap the bees.

"We don’t want them to get away," Arnold said, eyeing the thrumming cluster of bees pressing against the glass. "We don’t care about the honey, we just want the honeybees."

Arnold, a disabled World War II veteran and longtime Tracy resident, said that with his two newly acquired crates of honeybees, he’ll count close to 60 hives on his rural homestead.

For a few of the Opera House’s commercial tenants, the discovery meant a sweet snack before lunch and a neat story to tell the family after work.

Once word got out by midday Tuesday, merchants from down Ninth and 10th streets and Central Avenue made their way to the three-story building with cups and jars for their share of the free honey.

After hours spent sawing off layer after layer of intricate comb, the Wetters said they’d have to cut out several more feet of drywall to start chipping away at a second hive.

A few layers into the first comb, beekeepers pointed out the baby bees, the docile stinger-free drones and the frenetic pollen-gathering workers.

"Isn’t it something?" Birk asked rhetorically. "You can’t beat fresh honey."

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written by achabele , August 21, 2008

amazing. Our homeowners association just paid $1400 bucks to have some honeycombs and bees removed. Unfortunately because we had no access to the foreclosed town home we could not open the wall and save the bees. They were all exterminated.