Video: Honeybees need help at Grafton Town House
The call went out at about 6:30 p.m. Tuesday: Bee swarm at the Grafton Town House! Was a beekeeper available?
Bill Rychlik Jr. answered the call, but what he found wasn’t quite what he was expecting. Rather than a large mass of bees with a queen in search of a new hive, he discovered staggering bees flying around a drainpipe at the rear of the historic building.
And the bees were a colony of Italian honeybees that apparently had a hive in the wall behind the ivy-surrounded drainpipe. Rather than swarming, they appeared to be reacting to a pesticide or herbicide that had somehow made it into their hive.
“This is not good,” Rychlik said.
While he has hoped to relocate a swarm and protect the endangered honeybee population, these bees appeared to be a loss. Checking in with an apiary inspector from the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources, he was advised to keep an eye on the colony over the next week to see if it would recover.
Kathy Vandenengel of Apple Tree Arts said there had been no spraying on the building to the best of her knowledge and confirmed with Town House Tavern owner Sean Padgett that he had not requested spraying.
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Honey bees are an introduced non-native species that are partially responsible for the decline of our native pollinators. Many of our native pollinators are extremely endangered and some have gone extinct.
Honey bees are not needed in North America for any purpose other than agri-business. Being worried about honey bee populations is exactly like being worried about feral pig and cat populations declining.