South Africa: Rescuing and relocating wild honeybees in Cape Town

Although the Cape Honeybee is classified as not threatened, these chief pollinators are facing growing pressure in the sprawling South African city of Cape Town. But in 2018, a father and son team formed a conservancy dedicated to rescuing and relocating them. Since then, they've moved over 250 wild bee colonies from urban locations. These are considered problems because they would move into a house, into a vent for instance, and people might have little children and they're afraid, which they rightfully are. So I think people are inherently afraid of being stung, their children being stung, their animals. And we've attended a few scenes where animals have died from multiple bee stings. So I think inherently people see them as a problem and they see them as a danger to their family. Recently, they rescued about 40,000 wild honeybees who'd made their home in this cement garden feature. The local bee specialist says there are likely millions of colonies in the greater Cape Town area. You know, even in full urban environments, but especially in suburbia, there are always bees. There are bees everywhere. Wild colonies, they come in, they move in and they move out. And for the most part, they exist perfectly peacefully. People don't even know where they are. You have people in properties that have got colonies that have been there for 25 years and they've never actually seen them. They see them in their gardens, but they don't know where the bees are. Fortunately, there's also a lot of farms in the Cape, many of whom are happy to offer the bees a new home, including Radford Dale Organic Wine Farm in Elgin, which is about an hour and a half drive out of the city. Here we grow the grapes organically, we make organic wine, so that limits us a little bit in terms of what we can and cannot do, but it also creates quite an inviting environment for certain bugs to thrive in. Vineyards do not necessarily need bees to be pollinated, but it becomes a very important part of the ecosystem of farming in general and because we do not use any pesticides or herbicides on organic property it's a very safe space for the bees to be. We will never have issues with them dying because of a spray drift or something like that. So the initiative is helping protect residents while preserving the native bees that play a vital role in the region's unique biodiversity.