City Hall’s most notable mover and shaker one morning this month was an unassuming beekeeper from Wilmington.
Steve Macholz, with city employees watching from inside the building, coaxed some 20,000 members of the superfamily Apoidea and the order Hymenoptera from their perch on a tree at the building’s back end.
Macholz and another beekeeper were summoned by Joliet information services technician Karen Plyman after a city resident reported the bees blanketing the branch of the ornamental tree.
Macholz, who has kept bees for 32 years, set up his two-drawer white-box hive, then climbed the tree to shake the branch that some 20,000 bees were using for a temporary stopover.
Macholz identified the bees as Carniolans and Italians–the two kinds of honeybees most favored by beekeepers.
Adorned in his netted visor and heavy outer clothing, Macholz persuaded hundreds of honeybees to disregard the advice of swarm scouts and enter his hive, then gave the tree trunk a shake that stirred the swarm into a swirling mass that wowed city employees watching from inside the building. Thousands of those bees followed the original group into the hive.
Macholz said the swarm–led by the original queen–had broken off from its colony and probably traveled two or three blocks before coming to rest in the tree.
Macholz and the bees now all reside in Wilmington.
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