Spring has been a particularly busy time for Hong Kong beekeeper Harry Wong: As flowers bloom and temperatures rise, his bees are busy replenishing their food supplies and forming new colonies.
Hong Kong beekeeper Harry Wong at the Beetails conservation centre. Photo: Kyle Lam/HKFP.
This time of year also marks the start of honeybee migration season, meaning bees are more likely to appear in urban areas and come into contact with humans along the way.
One morning in late March, the 35-year-old man had just finished work at his apiary when he got a notification on his mobile phone. Volunteers from a bee rescue team had called to ask for help about a swarm of bees near a residential window. The request was urgent, they added.
Wong immediately contacted the rest of his team to see if anyone was nearby who could help, but while he was waiting for a reply, he received a message from the volunteer saying, “We’re OK. We’ve contacted the relevant department. We were in a hurry.”
The co-founder of environmental group Bee Tales says he doesn’t know what happened to the bees, but he suspects they were exterminated, as is standard practice for Hong Kong’s pest control services.
Honeybees at the BeeTales Conservation Centre. Photo: Kyle Lam/HKFP.
“I think this is due to our slow response and failure to widely disseminate information to the general public about protecting bees and not killing them. I’m sad,” Wong wrote on BeeTales’ Instagram account, the caption appearing alongside a photo of hundreds of bees that appeared to be huddled in a corner before being killed.
A few weeks later, a similar incident occurred: Wong again missed an opportunity to move a colony from a pedestrian street to Bee-Tales’ urban conservation center. Instead, he says, staff from “another department” arrived on the scene. While Wong was trying to assemble a team of volunteers, they had already “scrubbed the ground,” the beekeeper wrote on Instagram in April.
In Hong Kong, the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (FEHD) is responsible for controlling bees and wasps in public areas. The fate of bees found in private or public housing premises depends on the tenants or the building management company. The government’s public enquiry website recommends contacting private pest control companies for assistance.
Beetales offers an alternative.
It’s been almost four years since Wong started beekeeping and began campaigning to protect honeybees in urban areas. Even before he apprenticed with a local beekeeper, he was no stranger to insects. In an interview with HKFP last month, the former arborist said he often encountered honeybees while inspecting trees, but they were considered a nuisance to his work.
It was common practice for arborists to spray insecticides to scare off the bees, but Wong later realised that this wasn’t the best way to deal with them, as bees act as important pollinators and help sustain global food production.
While extermination takes about 10 minutes to clear out a colony and directly reduce the bee population, Wong and his volunteers can also spend several hours transporting the bees. They start by collecting the hives and guiding the bees into larger containers for transport, then search for the queen.
Hong Kong beekeeper Harry Wong at the Beetails conservation centre. Photo: Kyle Lam/HKFP.
Locating the queen bee is crucial to saving the colony, Wong said, as she is the only one capable of reproducing and sustaining the colony.
Once they find the queen, the rescuers capture her and place her in a container; the rest of the bees follow her, using the scent of their family members. Once the colony is under their care, Wong and the other rescuers inspect the hive and scout the area for suitable locations to release the bees back into the wild. Finding a location relatively far from people is key, Wong says.
If there isn’t a suitable place to release them into the wild, the bees are returned to Bee Tails’ conservation center.
Rescuers sometimes scoop up swarms with their bare hands, or they use tools like fluffy makeup brushes to gently and slowly guide the bees into a container.
“We want to provide people with options that are less harmful to nature,” Wong said.
BeeTail keeps the bees locked in wooden boxes equipped with thermometers to monitor their condition. Photo: Kyle Lam/HKFP.
Bee-Tails operated in the rural area of Yuen Long for about two years before relocating to an industrial building. A roof over the hives protects Wong and his team’s recycled bees from extreme heat and rain. The beekeepers have also set up data-collection equipment so they can better monitor and understand the insects.
Windows at the industrial facility had been left open to allow the bees to access the wooden boxes they live in to forage for food, but high temperatures in recent months have affected flowering patterns and some bees are having trouble finding enough food.
Wong checks on the conservation center’s eight colonies at least once or twice a week, feeding them with homemade pollen paste when needed. If the bees aren’t given enough food, different colonies can start competing for food, he says.
A wasp nest. Photo: Kyle Lam/HKFP.
Besides his rescue efforts, Wong also runs workshops for businesses and schools to teach them how to deal with different kinds of bees. He estimates there are more than 100 species of bees found in Hong Kong. About 75,000 species of hornets have been recorded worldwide, at least 30 of which can be found in Hong Kong, according to the Hornet Handbook published by the Hong Kong Environmental Protection Department.
Several workshops will feature everyday products containing bee-related ingredients, such as soap, lip balm and mead, allowing visitors to experience how their lives are connected to bees.
“We are trying to change the deep-rooted notions about bees and hopefully more people will embrace them in the future,” he said.
Hong Kong beekeeper Harry Wong pours mead fermented with honey collected from his bees at the Bee-Tales conservation centre. Photo: Kyle Lam/HKFP.
Beekeepers told HKFP that it is not uncommon to see swarms of bees gathering outside the windows of their homes. In most cases, the bees are just passing by or resting. As long as the bees are not building a nest, people can ignore them, Wong said.
More urgent situations involve hornets and wasps, which most people consider aggressive or dangerous. While fear is understandable, Wong said some hornet attacks are caused by people not understanding the insects well enough and reacting in ways that provoke them.
Wong said bees that had appeared in people’s homes were likely “lost”, and advised people to keep their distance by opening their windows wide, adding that the bees would calm down and find their way back home.
Hong Kong beekeeper Harry Wong at the Beetails conservation centre. Photo: Kyle Lam/HKFP.
BeeTales is actively trying to raise awareness so that private property management companies will contact them instead of the authorities or exterminators when they encounter swarms of bees. Wong acknowledged that the group still has a long way to go, as many management companies still consider themselves slow to respond. In their eyes, the easiest solution is to spray insecticide, Wong said.
When asked if he was disappointed that attempts to save the bees before they go extinct failed, Wong said he was, but that he recognized it was a reality he was trying to change.
“You don’t have to like bees, you just don’t have to kill them,” he said.
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