Tree cutters in despair after finding a 4-foot hive inside a hollow tree | Local

“He told me the bees went into his helmet and stung him, but he actually did well,” said Leslie Meyer, a neighbor of the Wilsons who helped pay for the tree to be cut down. “He didn’t have any kind of allergic reaction.”

Enter Patrick McCollum, a first-year beekeeper and friend of the Wilsons. Could he rescue the bees from the hollow of the tree, a common place for the insects to develop a hive?

McCollum, dressed in an oversized white beekeeping suit and accompanied by his wife, Teresa, cautiously approached the tree. He grabbed a hose and started spraying the colony with sugar water, which serves as food for the bees and helps calm them down.

After the bees were sprayed, Patrick McCollum picked up a suction attached to a wooden box and began vacuuming the colony out of the hollow. Then he began slicing the honeycomb walls of the hive to further drive out the bees.

Capturing as many bees as he could inside the boxes, McCollum’s plan was to take the insects to beeyards in Columbia where they adapt to a new hive.

It took him at least five hours to empty the tree hollow. He estimated that the hive he extracted was 4 feet tall, twice the size of an average one.

McCollum was able to harvest 20 pounds of honey from the hive. Honey stored inside the honeycombs plays an important role in providing structure for the colony.

“The honeycomb is what the bees build, and it’s the foundation for the hive,” said Teresa McCollum. “It’s where they lay their eggs, they store their pollen and where they store the nectar to make honey.”

The McCollums took up beekeeping last year after they found a hive in the siding of their home while remodeling.

“Once I got to watching them, I just got hooked,” Patrick McCollum said.

This was the first beehive the McCollums cut open themselves, which they estimate had been living in the tree hollow since at least last winter and possibly for the past couple of years.

They were perplexed when they couldn’t find the hive’s queen bee, which is the mother of all the bees in the hive. McCollum was unsure how many bees were in this particular hive, but he said usually a hive consists of anywhere between 20,000 and 80,000 bees.

Bees pollinate about one-third of crops worldwide, according to Live Science, a science news publication. Recently, bee populations worldwide have been threatened by colony collapse disorder, a condition caused by a parasite called microsporidia that attacks bees and other bugs. The parasite has devastated insect populations that are crucial to pollinating crops in North America and Europe.

“Bees are great for the environment and are super interesting,” McCollum said. “There’s just so much to learn about them.”