Honey, he saved the bees

James Kozak removed a giant hive from Edgartown house before demolition.

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In this file photo, James Kozak suited up to remove a hive from a house scheduled for demolition. — Stacey Rupolo

The first thing you notice is the hum echoing inside the vacant house. It’s a steady din. There is an eeriness to the empty house — dozens of dead or stunned bees litter the plywood floor.

Beekeeper and Martha’s Vineyard Honey proprietor James Kozak, even before he dons his white protective suit, appears unfazed by the constant buzz.

“This is a rare opportunity when you can extract a hive intact,” he says. On Saturday he was called by Geoff Gibson of Gibson Landscaping to remove a hive from an Edgartown home that Mr. Gibson plans to demolish.

“At first I thought they were wasps,” Mr. Gibson told The Times. He took a closer look with a video camera and found they were bees. “I knew there were a lot of them,” he said. He wanted them spared the wrecking ball. “They’re having a hard enough time as it is and I didn’t want to add to it,” he said. “I was glad James was willing to do it.”

While Tuesday’s extraction could have cost as much as $300, Mr. Kozak, who already has about 30 working hives spread across the Island at farms and private homes, did the work for the hive, the bees and, ultimately, the honey that comes with it. He sells his honey at farmers’ markets, through his Facebook page and at Cronig’s, Vineyard Grocer, and Trader Fred’s, among others.

Mr. Kozak couldn’t believe his eyes when he removed the siding and plywood. What he found was a hive six feet tall, six inches thick inside the second-floor wall, which would weigh in at an estimated 300 pounds. While most hives have about 40,000 to 50,000 bees, Mr. Kozak estimates this mega-hive is home to more than 100,000 carniolan domesticated bees.

“The previous owners extricated themselves,” Mr. Kozak says. “The bees did not.”

Over several days, Mr. Kozak worked methodically to expose the hive beneath the walls. He fashioned screening around it. He hatched a plan to ease the structure to the ground using a systems of ropes and pulleys.

On Tuesday, as bees swarmed around him, he tip-toes across scaffolding. Using smoke in attempt to calm the bees — apparently it encourages them to prepare for a forest fire — Mr. Kozak ties ropes around the screening.

“These worker bees, it’s like a backup at Kennedy Airport at Christmas,” he says from a perch 20 feet in the air. “They’re all loaded up with pollen.”

All the while, his assistant June Winsone Smith provides support from below — most of it of the moral variety.

From start to finish, Tuesday’s final phase of the extraction took about an hour and a half — as well as a half-dozen bee stings, including one each for the reporter and photographer on the scene.

With two final cuts from a Sawzall, Mr. Kozak guides the massive hive to the ground and rests it next to the house. The movement sends hundreds of bees buzzing around him and the hive.

But his worries about the hive crashing to the ground and the bees scattering in a fit of anger were put to rest.

The bees were clearly agitated by their ride down the side of the house on the pulley system.

“They’re flying out of the hive like fighter jets off an aircraft carrier,” Mr. Kozak says.

He offers a closer view, but it’s clear the bees are angry. We decline having already felt their sting.

Mr. Kozak plans to wait a couple of days for the bees to settle down, then either after sunset or before sunrise, he plans a covert mission to move the bees and the hive to a place where he can harvest honey for sale. These will likely be kept on local farms or near private homes that get the benefit of the bees pollinating flowers and fruit trees.

“If you had to reconstruct it, the chance of survival would not be great,” he says, noting that they would have drank up a belly full of honey and looked for a new hollowed-out tree or another place to build a hive. “It wasn’t graceful, but this was a good outcome.”