The site has been abuzz as of late. For the past few months, western honeybees have turned LIGO from interferometer to apiary. The first swarm, near the LSB lift station was reported in early May. Since then, Facilities group and others have been combing the site, and some 15 colonies have been captured and extracted with the help of Phillip Johnson from The Bee Team (seen in buzzworthy photos below). 

The bees have been largely indiscriminate about hive habitat selection. To date we have removed them from spools, BTE interiors, irrigation boxes and connexes. It's not clear where the bees came from, or how they got here. The nearest location to site that I could find which would utilize bees, Brainstorm Cellars, is some 6 miles away. This is further than a swarm will migrate. Stranger yet, the habitat between us and the nearest possible location is, to my understanding, not favorable for hive building which would rule out leap frogging to us. Nevertheless, the bees are here and thriving. The queens are prolific egg layers; the forager bees are caked in pollen and the extractions of more established colonies are chalked full with 10's of pounds of delicious, capped honey. Bee temperament is, across the board, very mild. Even during our most invasive extractions they seem largely unbothered. 

All that to say, I hope to see the increase of bees across site taper off strongly, especially as we inch closer to Fall. In the meantime, M. Landry has recently reached out to the WSU Honeybees and Pollinators Program to help us understand how we came to find this abnormal explosion of bees. That meeting has yet to take place. 


C. Soike, M. Robinson, T. Guidry