By Rita Howell

Lucky for voters the Little Church on Panola Avenue is no longer used as a voting precinct. It has lately been inhabited by a colony of bees. Or was until beekeeper Mike Marmino of Batesville came to the rescue last Friday.

Honey bees had taken up residence inside a ceiling beam just inside the front doors of the 113-year-old frame church building which is now owned by the City of Batesville and used weekly by the Abiding in the Spirit Church. The bees were becoming an increasing problem, so the city contacted Marmino to come get ‘em.

The process turned out to be more than he’d expected. The bees, all 60,000, had established their home inside the hollow space of the boxed-in ceiling beam. In all likelihood the bees had been there for three years, maybe more.

To gain access to the colony and remove it, Marmino and City of Batesville purchasing agent Mark Shields removed a board from the bottom of the beam to expose a mass of honeycomb, bees, wax and honey. High on a ladder, Marmino used what looked like a small shop vac to suck the bees out of their cozy compartment. The critters were deposited into a plastic bucket fitted with a screen lid. The queen bee was among the first batch confiscated. Apparently, that’s the key. Apprehend the queen and the rest will follow willingly.

After capturing everybody who was home on Friday morning, Marmino began scraping the interior of the hive, filling up five-gallon buckets with a mixture of wax, honey, bee housing, and straggler bees.

The only way to eliminate the colony from the Little Church, he said, is to remove all traces of the hive, wax and honey so no bees would return to live there.

He began the work early Friday morning, after worker bees had departed in their daily search of nectar.

Marmino said the bees can travel as far as two miles from the hive looking for nectar. Around midday on Friday, those workers were returning to the Little Church, their nectar sacs full and yellow pollen coating their legs.

Marmino and Shields, working with hoods and long gloves on, carried on their project, sucking up more bees as they returned to their disassembled hive on the ceiling of the church.

Marmino had brought a wooden hive box with him and carefully slid chunks of gooey honeycomb into narrow wooden brood chambers which he placed into the hive box to prepare a new home for the Panola Ave. bees.

Eventually he poured the captured bees into the hive box, where they found familiar surroundings, just rearranged. With the queen inside the new hive box, the rest of the colony was content to stay, too.

He left the hive box near a corner of the Little Church building overnight so any lollygagging members could join the rest of the colony to be transported to Marmino’s Dees Road residence in southeastern Panola County.

There he already has two colonies.

After last weekend’s colony relocation, “we did not see any stragglers on Sunday,” reported Irvin Greene of the Abiding in the Spirit Church on Monday.

Meanwhile beekeeper Marmino is planning to purify some of the honey he collected at The Little Church.
After depositing what the bees need for their own nourishment in their new quarters, he’ll strain some of what’s left for his own use, a sweet reward for a hot day’s work.