The buzz at the airport

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, November 11th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: a sweet solution to a sticky problem.

Flights at airports get delayed for a lot of reasons, weather, technical problems, and sometimes very small problems.

REICHARD: Turns out, honeybees can cause delays. It happens when a hive lands on a jet and won’t leave. That’s where pest control usually comes in.

But an airport in Pennsylvania came up with a clever way to prevent these bee swarms on planes in the first place. WORLD’s Emma Eicher reports.

SOUND: [Starting up the smoker, blast of flame from the blowtorch]

EMMA EICHER: Steve Repasky holds a metal can with smoke billowing out of it.

REPASKY: Starting up the smoker here …

The air smells like toasted pine shavings.

REPASKY: This is our safety harness when we go into the bees. So when you disturb bees, they can release an alarm pheromone, which can cause them to get a little aggravated. The smoke actually masks the alarm pheromone, so that when we do open up a colony, it just calms them down.

Repasky zips us both into thick jackets, with netting around the face. He’s been a beekeeper since he was 4 years old, helping his dad tend their own hives at home.

EICHER: How often have you been stung?

REPASKY: Not as often as I get asked that question.

At the Pittsburgh International Airport, there are airplanes and acres of tarmac.

There are also millions of honeybees buzzing around fields of goldenrod and butterfly weed.

The airport owns 8800 acres and Repasky is allowed to use 6000 of them for his apiaries. He also calls them “beeyards”—the more colloquial beekeeper term.

REPASKY: Every mile, mile and a half, there's a bee yard somewhere, and they're tucked back in like you wouldn't see them. All these other yards are kind of kept out of sight, out of mind, doing what they do best, which is producing nectar and honey.

It all began in 2012, when a swarm of honeybees landed on a Delta jet, causing a flight delay.

A “swarm” begins when a queen bee leaves the hive to start a new colony and about half the bees follow her. Sometimes, the bees land when they’re tired. Then they cluster around the queen until scout bees find a new place to build a hive.

The Pittsburgh airport used to get about a dozen swarms a year. And that’s where Repasky comes in.

REPASKY: I was called in to remove the bees and relocate them. And over the next several years, we were catching swarms here and there, and I started inquiring about keeping bees on the property, and here we are.

According to him, the solution to the bee swarm problem was simply to lean into it.

REPASKY: We have fewer swarms on the airfield now than we did prior to bees getting here. And you think it would be the opposite, where there's more bees on the outside, so you can get more swarms, but because we manage these colonies better, you're not getting those swarms on the airfield.

Nowadays, the airport only gets one or two swarms a year.

In 2015, Pittsburgh was the first city to start keeping bees on airport property to prevent swarms. At least four other major cities have followed suit: Seattle, Portland, Chicago, and St. Louis.

REPASKY: When we started the program, at one point, we were the largest apiary program entirely on an airport property.

But it’s a tricky undertaking. The job is mostly about just trying to keep the bees alive and that’s pretty difficult.

REPASKY: I mean, you know, typically, we lose anywhere from 10 to 40% of our colonies. We're dealing with mother nature, and you could only, you can only predict or do so much.

Every day is a challenge—mostly with what Repasky calls the four Ps: pesticides, poor nutrition, pathogens, and pests. Honeybees are vulnerable to all of them.

Fortunately, the airport property is a safe haven with limited pesticide use and plenty of pollen from wildflowers.

But even the best environment doesn’t guarantee success.

REPASKY: Biggest challenge is just Mother Nature. You know, we're fortunate out here. We have the space. The biggest thing is, year to year, what Mother Nature is going to bring.

When he’s not tending the hives, Repasky works at his own pest control company for stinging insects.

REPASKY: Part of the agreement was, if you allow me to keep bees here on the property, my services are available to the airport, that when they do get swarms, I just come out and take care of them.

For a part-time job, it keeps him busy with 150 colonies to look after. In this particular beeyard overlooking the runway, there are at least 40 hives in wooden boxes.

Repasky opens a box to peer inside. The bees seem curious, buzzing around us to get a good look.

REPASKY: Okay, let me smoke ‘em and see if that gets in. [Bees buzzing]

The sticky combs in the middle of the hive are packed with honey. But the outer cells are bare. The weather has a lot to do with how much honey a hive makes. And honey production is also a foreshadowing for winter food stores.

A dry hive is a dead hive.

REPASKY: In a good year, we might harvest anywhere between two and three tons of honey out here. This year, not so much because it's been a dry year.

That’s the hard part about working in agriculture. It’s unpredictable.

EICHER: Why do you like beekeeping so much?

REPASKY: Who said I like it? [laughing] Keeping honey bees is kind of like playing a game that you'll never win, right? So there's so many different levels, and every time you think you beat a level or find a shortcut, the bees kind of put you in your place and say, Yeah, nope, try again.

And the advice he gives to amateur beekeepers applies to his job too.

REPASKY: What we tell people is, your bees are going to die. They're gonna die the first year. They're gonna die the second year, they might even die the third, fourth and fifth year. But that's part of it, right?

But Repasky says God sustains his work. For him, he’s just glad to do his share, caring for a small part of creation.

REPASKY: We're just happy to provide a place for the bees to live, and we're happy that the airport allows us to have that place. I think it was Aristotle that said that in all things of nature, there's something of the marvelous.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Emma Eicher in Pittsburgh.

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