The Urban Bee Patrol
Bucharest could literally be considered a huge beehive.
Roxana Vasile, 25.09.2024, 14:00
The concrete walls and trees groomed every season, are sometimes home to bees with honeycombs. Tens of thousands of bees find shelter in ventilation openings, in the attics of numerous houses, including heritage buildings, in hospitals, embassies, ministries, parks and cemeteries.
Emergency services call centers receive, every week, requests for help from people who want to get rid of these insects. That is why the Urban Bee Patrol was established, a group of volunteer beekeepers who protect people from bees and bees from people. The Bee Patrol is an interface between citizens and beekeepers, prepared to intervene and extract swarms of unwanted bees or those that settle in inappropriate places in the city, some of them quite unusual, as Marian Pătraşcu, the founder of the Patrol, explains: ʺEvery situation, even if they look identical, has a particularity. As a rule, they sit on a low branch, but they also sit on high branches. For instance, our assistance was requested at the National Cathedral, where there are three rings that adorn the building at a height of 50m, and the workers noticed at least three bee colonies. We could only come and note their presence there. We couldn’t break the walls and we let them live there because we are beekeepers, we work with bees and we don’t kill them. They are harmless. Also, there are many bee families in the Parliament building, they work there tirelessly. In a block on the Victory Boulevard, the central honeycomb was 1.80m high, as it had been there for at least 5 years. They hadn’t bothered anyone. In an abandoned house in Plumbuita, 20 honeycombs. Somewhere near Bucharest, in a broken window, about 100kg of honey in honeycombs. It is a shame that these values are lost, that they are not capitalized on!ʺ
Paradoxically, bees live happier in Bucharest, with its suffocating traffic, because they have cleaner food than the bees in the countryside. That is because urban green spaces, as few as there are, are not poisoned with pesticides or herbicides. “The urban environment has become very friendly for bee families. Here, they constantly find a source of food, nectar, they have flowers constantly, in parks, in squares, in all floral arrangements that are constantly changed and watered from spring until late autumn”, says Marian Pătraşcu: “In the big cities, the bees do extremely well, because the authorities ensure a permanently blooming environment, the flowers are changed, they are watered, even if we don’t have precipitation, which is no longer the case in rural areas. We even say it every time we are called for intervention, that the urban environment has become a heaven for bees, compared to the rural environment, where flowers are extremely limited, exposed to excessive weeding, drought, climate change – all these have contributed to poor conditions in the rural environment, and the urban one is an alternative.ʺ
The Urban Bee Patrol, through its founder, urges the citizens of Bucharest not to try to drive away the bees by themselves, but to ask for help: ʺThey must notify the authorities. We have been active in Bucharest, the Ilfov county and beyond for six years. We have this website where we tried to show people that it is something normal. Bees can be our friends and we must act as such. Without them there is no life. Well, it’s simple – notify the authorities, a beekeeper or directly the emergency service 112, who call us and we know what we have to do. During the swarming period, there is an average 30-40 situations reported daily, and during the peak period, we receive up to 100 calls in Bucharest and Ilfov county alone. Almost all are solved. For us, the primary thing is not to endanger the lives of the citizens or of the beekeepers who intervene. Surely bees can settle in another place. Do we have any knowledge of them ever becoming dangerous? We do not. They only created problems when people bothered them.”
The honey produced by the bees in the Capital could become a brand of the city. Marian Pătrașcu: ʺ Even Herodotus said that, in this area beyond the Danube, one could not enter due to the multitude bee swarms. Let’s not forget that, for hundreds of years, tribute was given in honey, wax and other products. Three out of five houses had beehives in the garden. However, in the past 30 years, there has been this amplified fear of bees, which, in our opinion, is unjustified, and, I repeat, we must behave normally, as they are part of our life and we must learn to live with them.ʺ
A client of the Urban Bee Patrol tasted the “wild” honey from Bucharest and said that, apart from being lighter in cooler than the one we all know, it is very, very good!
