Bee tree!

[pdqdl]

We went to the cemetery today to cut down and haul off a dead pine tree. We went to the log pile with our Bobcat and recovered three big logs to pad the street from the falling log; it was rather tall, and about 40" DBH. Even though I had looked at this tree several times before, I never noticed the little insects flying in and out about 20 feet up.

Oh crap! We have a bee tree. Quick! Go get the bee suit.

...Then we dropped it into the road, right on target on the logs.

OMG! The bees were everywhere. They would lay into you if you came within 75 feet of the drop zone, which was only 120' from the main office for the cemetery. When you were in the bobcat loading logs, you would easily have 20-50 bees at all times trying to sting the cab/windows/loader frame. They followed that thing everywhere, too.

We had a ground man equipped with our beekeeper suit, carrying the Husqvarna 3120 to quickly chop it into 8-12 foot sections. We had the Bobcat on standby to load the logs up. As you might expect, we kept the windows closed and the AC on!

The sections were loaded into our F-550 and hauled away to the dump zone, again, with the driver in the cab with the windows up and the AC on. When all the logs and branches were hauled away (I used the grapple to break branches off the logs), we got the smooth bucket mounted on the Bobcat and we scooped up all the debris in the street, much like a large shovel.

Almost all the job was done from the safety of an enclosed cab and one man in our only bee-proof suit. No, we never ran out of bees, either. The whole tree was gone, but there were plenty of them left to get even with us.

In the end, only one person got stung (me, right on my bald spot!) Sorry, we took no pictures. Here is an aerial photo of where it was:

Latitude: 39.002419°
Longitude: -94.573028°

After it was dropped, the pine stretched all the way to the circle in the middle of the street, a distance of 70' by Google Earth measure.

 

[jropo]

Nice!
Good thing ya had all the right stuff to get the job done safely!

 

[RVALUE]

I had a similar experience a couple days ago. Went to take down a half dead elm, and it was covered throughout with: Hornets, red wasps, boring bees, and either immature something or anothers, or regular honey bees. No nests, and they weren't aggressive. They were everywhere in the tree, both in the dead and live parts. There were thousands of them, of all varieties. After the tree laid on the ground overnite, they were still buzzing around. They seemed to be on the wood versus the leaves.

Strange, and not something common to what I have experienced.

IF they were aggressive, I don't know how I would have been able to take it down.

 

[pdqdl]

Our honeybees were definitely aggressive!

We have a bee-suit because my mother used to keep bees. When I helped out (only rarely), our bees would just buzz around a little bit. We weren't good enough bee keepers to work without the suits, though.

The bee tree we cut down was a different story. They were really PO'ed about their tree laying on the ground, and they were going to get even with whoever did it.