Combination of factors spell end for raising critters in city of Las Vegas

Jeffrey Libby

Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2000 | 11:52 a.m.

When Rick Grange answers the front door of his Shoen Avenue home, he's just another bare-chested homeowner trying to keep cool, his honey-colored hair knocked back in a wave. You wouldn't know it, but he's the last registered beekeeper within the city limits of Las Vegas.

In two backyard hives he houses some 80,000 Yugoslavian and Italian honey bees. And if you take Grange at his word, he says the bees have co-existed with him, his wife, two boys and two girls, a dog, three cats, and a number of fish for 10 years without incident.

But the bees' days are numbered. In November, Grange will harvest his hives for the last time. His neighbors and his friends at the Tropicana hotel-casino, where he has worked as a craps dealer for 22 years, will have to look elsewhere for their honey fix.

Grange is giving up honey for pest control. And he's not the only one.

According to Gina Stoneking, an administrator at the state Department of Agriculture, the combination of new regulations, the controversy surrounding Africanized honey bees and a recent influx of devastating mites has dulled much of the fun for hobbyists tending to a hive or two of honey bees.

"(Beekeeping) has become a lot of hard work for very little money," Grange said. "It won't be the same killing bees as working with them. But I guess I'll be helping out the citizenry. And what can you do?"

The city of Las Vegas outlawed beekeeping in April 1997. Three years later inspectors are getting around to enforcing the ordinance.

In July, by certified mail, the city planning department informed Grange that his bees would have to be destroyed or removed by Oct. 2, although they later gave him an extension until November.

Africanized honey bees, which arrived in May 1998 via the Colorado River after a 41-year migration north from Brazil, made local headlines this spring after a pair of stinging attacks left two elderly Las Vegans hospitalized.

The Africanized honey bees, more aggressive than their European counterparts, have been held responsible for six deaths in the United States since arriving in Texas in 1990.

But according to Douglas Selby, deputy city manager of Las Vegas, the recent enforcement of the 1997 regulation does not stem from a concern for public safety or from the fact that the Department of Agriculture estimates as many as 75 percent of bees in the Las Vegas Valley have been Africanized.

Instead, Selby said that in an effort to streamline an emerging urban landscape, city planners lumped bees in with other public nuisances such as sidewalk furniture sales, crack houses, graffiti and front-yard grasses over 8 inches high.

"I understand that the planning department was concerned with tire sales on East Charleston and the outdoor furniture displays on Main Street," Selby said.

Boulder City took another approach. In June, city officials enacted regulations specific to bees based on recommendations from the Department of Agriculture.

Drawn up in response to public outcry at a dog killed last summer by Africanized honey bees, the regulations add new requirements for keeping bees, but don't work toward eliminating the hobby and business.

"There is a need to have bees, particularly European bees, and we have to have a way to monitor them," Boulder City Councilman Joe Hardy said. "If we don't have bees, we're going to be in trouble, from a pollination standpoint. And it's only with beekeepers that we have any chance of keeping European bees."

Hardy said that in drafting the new regulations, the council attempted to balance a desire for public safety with the understanding that bees as a population cannot be eradicated. "They're sneaky little creatures," he said.

According to the new requirements, bees must be kept on parcels no smaller than one acre and beekeepers must "requeen" hives each spring. By purchasing a $10 queen guaranteed fertilized by a European drone, beekeepers can ensure that the hive does not become Africanized, according to state entomologists.

For Stoneking, making allowances to keep beekeepers in operation is especially important now.

"If people are keeping European bees, it helps to dilute the population of Africanized bees," Stoneking said. "We want people to keep bees. Everyone who wants to keep bees, they're welcome to."

As Leonard Joy, a state entomologist, points out, a third of all the food consumed in the world relies on bees for pollination.

"If you walk down the produce aisle, you take away the rhubarb, the potatoes, grapes, mushrooms -- and the rest you have to pollinate to put the seed in the ground, or pollinate to produce the fruit."

Though Joy is critical of what he sees as an exaggerated response to the actual dangers posed by Africanized bees, much of his recent work has focused on a more tangible enemy to the European honey bee: mites.

Just 10 years ago, more than 600 beekeepers worked 1,600 colonies of bees in Nevada. That was in what beekeepers now refer to as the good old days, before the arrival of the varroa mite, the trachea mite and more recently, the small hive beetle.

By July 1999, just 52 beekeepers and less than 600 colonies remained in the state.

On the national level, devastation from mites has reduced bee colonies from 12 million to 8 million.

And pest control services answering to the new demand for removal of bees, Africanized or otherwise, are on the rise.

Since 1998 the state has issued more than 30 new extermination licenses, more than the previous three years combined.

Range is one of those new licensees. When his children answer the phone these days, it's not honey "from the Killer Hives of Rick Grange" they're hawking, but his new business: Bee King Bee Removal.

"Say you live in Reno and have a colony of bees," Joy said. "If you lose your colony of bees, everyone within a half-mile radius is going to lose some if they have gardens."

Gardeners aren't the only losers.

So are Grange's neighbors. He has kept them happy -- and quiet -- for years by bringing by a couple jars of fresh honey each November. And this year's harvest, which he said looks like one of the best, will most likely be the last.

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