Let it bee: Women on mission to keep them buzzing

MEXICO CITY-"Knife," Adriana Veliz says with the concentration of a brain surgeon.

Shrouded in a white bee suit, she lies stretched out on the ground in one of Mexico City's most buzzing districts. Taking the knife, she pries open the side of a light post and flashes a glowing red lantern on a humming bee hive.

Veliz is on a mission to save the approximately 20,000 bees inside.

She heads a group of mostly women who are working hive by hive to relocate bees that would be exterminated if they remained in Mexico's crowded capital city.

The group, Abeja Negra SOS, was born in 2018 when Veliz — a veterinarian working for the city government at the time — noticed that when authorities received calls about beehives, the automatic response was to exterminate the bees.

She and other colleagues began looking for an alternative. "We do these rescues because it's a species that's in danger of extinction," said Veliz, who works for Abeja Negra SOS. "We give them a second chance."

Globally, bee populations have been decimated in recent decades. The United States alone is estimated to have lost around 25 percent of its bees in the past 40 years.

The drop is often blamed on human causes: the use of damaging chemicals, destruction of natural habitats and climate change.

Over the past five years, they have relocated around 510 hives, with an average size of about 80,000 bees.

Late on a recent Thursday night, Veliz peers into the hive the size of a small melon lodged inside the street lamp. Tonight, they are lucky, she says. This is a small colony and it's calm, Veliz explains, referring to the hive as "hippie bees".

As they go, they search for the queen, a key element to rehabilitating the bees and assuring the colony gets relocated smoothly.

Once a hive is safely stored inside the box, the group takes the bees to the rural outskirts of the city, where they can recover and grow strong. They later donate the bees to local bee farmers or release them into the wild.

The team has run into hurdles because they charge a bit more than $300 for removing a hive, mainly to cover logistical costs. For many in the city, it's still easier to call firefighters to exterminate bees for free.

Agencies via Xinhua