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The Buzz No One Wants: How Arborists Handle Stinging Insects · Talking Trees with Davey Tree

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Davy Tree Expert Company's podcast, Talking Trees.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Doug Oester.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Each week, our expert arborists share advice on seasonal tree care, how to make your trees thrive, arborists' favorite trees, and much, much more.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: Tune in every Thursday to learn more because here at the Talking Trees Podcast, we know trees are the answer.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: This week we're talking to Tyson Geldseth.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: He's a district manager for the Debut Tree Expert Company in Tacoma, Washington.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: Our topic today is something I've never even thought about before.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: The buzz about tree care, how arborists work safely around stinging insects.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_02: Tyson, how are you?
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Doing very well.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: How are you?
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: I'm doing good.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Before we get going on the bugs, how's your season starting?
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: So far, so good.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's a mild winter up here in the Seattle area.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but we did have a little bit of flooding, a little snow, but hanging in there.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: So let's talk about stinging insects.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: Again, it's something I've never thought about before, but something I'm sure arborists encounter quite often, right?
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the big fears for arborists.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: They're concerned about what am I gonna do if I find a bee in a tree and I get stung unexpectedly?
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: How can I get myself out of that situation?
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, definitely.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, especially if you're up there high, is do you just are you always looking for that or is it all usually a surprise?
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: Because geez, it could be anywhere.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: So it's gonna be person to person, but we basically should always be watching for bees, and that's gonna start with your ground inspection before you start climbing.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thing with bees though, they're gonna be hidden in little cracks, they could be in the ground in ivy, they could be in little cavities inside of the tree.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: You might not be able to see the cavity from the ground.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so climbers have to constantly just watch for signs or sounds that there could be bees present.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: And sounds that that's yeah, that sounds good.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, they're going to be surprised some of the time.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, we're human, so we're we are going to make mistakes, and bees will capitalize on those mistakes.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: Now, out here on the other side of the country, we have big paper nests of wasps that that hide in trees.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_02: And unfortunately, I've encountered them myself when they've built their uh their nest low to the ground, which is rare, but uh it's called a bald-faced hornet.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: Do you have anything like that out that way, hornets and wasps that that go up in the trees?
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: So we have two kinds of trees that are two kinds of bees that are most commonly a problem for an arborist climbing a tree.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, those can be the bald-faced hornets, extremely aggressive.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, luckily, the nests, like you said, it's a big football-shaped paper mache ball that's hanging off of a branch in a tree.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but yellow jackets can also get into trees up here, and so that can be another big problem.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, they're both so nasty.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: So, let me tell you about my encounter.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: This this was so ridiculous because I'd never seen them so low.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: It was in a uh azalea, and I had uh I was tugging on a hose and it was like 90 degrees out.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_02: I was just wearing a pair of shorts, and tugging on that hose didn't make those bald-faced hornets very happy.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: It was like a comic book, like you feel the pain and you look down at your legs and you're covered with bald-faced hornets.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_02: Then I just went running full speed up into the woods and came back down and jumped in the pool, and uh along the way I was screaming like an idiot.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, uh honestly, anybody that's been outside a fair amount has probably had something almost identical happen to them as well.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's just so easy to get caught by low nests.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: They get disturbed by vibrations, you're stepping on something or hit a low branch or shrub that's hiding one of those nests in it, and the bees are gonna protect their territory.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I wasn't hanging 30 feet up in a tree.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: That's the thing that would, and like you said, boy, that would be, you know, like I'm sure with the expertise of the climbers, you could get away pretty quick, but not as fast as running up into the woods and then jumping in a pool.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, and there's no there's no pond for an arborist to get under with a straw to be able to breathe from underneath the water, unfortunately.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the difference for a climber is a lot of times they're the the trees could be extremely thick, there's just a lot going on, so they could be distracted, uh, they could be talking to the ground, customer on the ground.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, they might honestly just be having some tension around what they're doing and making sure that they're just safe from other hazards, and then suddenly they're face to face with a bald-faced hornet nest that they've accidentally just whacked with their handsaw.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: And in that case, the hope would be that they are already tied in and can just repel instantly out of the tree.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: But the reality is it's just not always the case.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Their rope may not be long enough to reach the ground, uh, or they might have just got up to that location, got up there on spurs, say it's a removal, and they might not be fully set up to be able to reach the ground yet.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: So now you've you're in the middle of a of an attack of bald-faced hornets or yellow jackets, with them actively stinging you, and you have to then take your time to tie in properly, dress your knots, clip all of your gear on, and do a safety check before repelling.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just that is the the nightmare scenario for for a climber.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: And keep in mind these bald-faced hornets and yellow jackets they can sting you repeatedly, they don't just sting once.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_02: That sounds like an absolute nightmare.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: Have you ever seen anything like that?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_02: Or is it rare?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the time up here, we've gotten lucky, and the crews notice the bees before an attack starts.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the bald-faced hornets, they're they have that small nest, but they can still have large populations, hundreds of bees in a nest.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_02: And they're so well hidden.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_02: I'm always surprised after the season's over when the leaves drop off the tree where one of those nests were.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: And in some cases, it's places I've walked past a hundred times during the summer and never encountered them.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: They were up high enough where I wasn't bothering them.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: The idea is if you want to keep your nest safe, you're going to kind of be hidden.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's it exactly.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: They're not trying to put their nest in a spot that's easily identifiable by predators or things that might attack their nest.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: They're just going in a location that's sheltered from rain, bad weather, and hopefully close to food of some kind, food or water, whichever version they're going after.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the the uh plan for me that was given to me from a friend said, go out at night and just put a bag around that uh that nest.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I went out, and again, it was like 85 degrees, and I could hear them inside, like hitting.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, I'm not doing this.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: There's no way I'm gonna get out of this alive.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_02: So when you do have to go up into a tree, and there you see that there's a cavity with yellow jackets, or if there's a big paper wasp nest, you got to take care of it, right?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, otherwise you're not gonna be able to get up in the tree.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it can be there's a lot of different ways to go about it.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: So if it's if it's wasps, if it's basically if it's the bald face hornets or it's the yellow jackets, uh, we can spray those, but they're not always in a spot that we're we are able to spray them.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so if it's if it's just not safe, uh, we can't access it, we will allow the crew to call an all stop, and then we'll either have the homeowner or we can contact basically a pest control company or a beekeeper if it's if it does happen to be a protected bee.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_02: If it's if it's honey bees, you if you certainly you certainly want to save that.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we know that out here, and that that happens all the time.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: We see it all the time, where you get into a tree, and actually, I had this happen this spring when we had a storm, and I never knew there was a feral colony there, uh, just uh in the woods, and like a big black cherry cracked open, and there was my feral colony.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I haven't even looked at it this spring to see if it made it through the winter, but again, it's the same thing.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: You you're you're not gonna know they're there until you get up there.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_02: Now, encountering a honey beehive is a little less dangerous, in my opinion, or am I got do I have that wrong?
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's right, it's it is less dangerous.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: People, but the the problem is, you know, the public and honestly climbers in general, they're not educated about bees.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you have a say you have an intern on a tree crew, he doesn't know what flying insect just landed on him or is flying around his face.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: He's just gonna think, oh my gosh, I'm gonna get stung, get the bee spray.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, which is an understandable reaction, but the problem is those honey bees, they are important.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, technically, uh in most areas they're protected now, too.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: So if you sprayed in say you have a water feature on your property, and you spray with a bunch of beekiller, and that's where the neighbor's honeybees from their, you know, say they have a bee colony on their property, you've now killed your neighbor's bees, and there could be some penalties to that if they were to find out.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_02: That's a great point because as you said, most people can't differentiate between a wasp, a yellow jack, and a honey bee.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's just something that's gonna sting you.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it they both hurt that you will have you do have a reaction potential to both.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: The difference with if you do know it's honeybees, they can only sting you one time.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: With that said, there can be, you know, a honey bee colony can be absolutely massive if it's inside of trees.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you could be talking like 60,000 bees in a colony.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_02: That's what I was gonna say.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: 60,000.
• 10:50
  unknown: Oh man.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Compared to yeah, like a yellow jacket nest can get pretty big, but they're most you hear about ones underground that are like 10 feet long, but usually 15,000 bees, that's gonna be a big colony.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then the bald-faced hornets, that's in the hundreds, you know.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: But but the difference is they you might only have 700 bees in a big bald-faced nest, but they'll sting you five times each and bite you.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I I don't I don't know if I've felt pain like that before when I encountered those bald-faced hornets uh enough where I never want to encounter them again.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_02: In your area, is there a time of the year that's safer, or they or is this a year-round thing, or is is there a time when it's worse?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think in in general, once it starts, once we kind of start getting into fall, colonies do start kind of falling apart, declining.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Bees do tend to be, I wouldn't say they have emotions, but they are the angriest then.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they're the most volatile and likely to try to protect their space because they're already stressed.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, once you start having that cold, maybe food is not as easy to come by anymore of any kind.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, keep in mind that bald-faced hornets, yellow jackets, they're not they're not pollinators, but they do benefit us in in a different way because they they eat other pests that are on properties that that we might want to spray.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so once once it gets cold, there's less food, they start looking for it elsewhere.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_02: That's a great point because people don't understand that even though a yellow jacket and a bald-faced hornet, when we encounter them, it's a dangerous thing.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_02: It is part of the cycle of of nature, the cycle of life.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Both, yeah, that's just that we kind of think of yellow jackets and bald-faced hornets as only being a negative, like, oh your property, you have to keep your property from having these pests.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: But on the flip side, if you don't have bees and some natural way to get rid of aphids and all sorts of other just large insect pests, you kind of get set yourself up to having to spray for them then.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_02: Is there anything else like biting-wise, that you can encounter up in a tree?
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: Are there caterpillars that could uh sting you or anything like that, or is it mostly bees and wasps?
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: Up here, the one that that matter the most are gonna be the stinging insects.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: As far as that kind of a pest.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we don't yeah, we don't have huge issues with you know other kinds of spiders.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's possible, uh, but it's not common, and it's not something that people typically are particularly afraid of.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_02: Well, at least you have those three things only to worry about.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's a good thing.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: Uh any other suggestions for your crews when they're going out?
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh is that one of the warnings that you give them?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: Like, hey, uh, you know, we're at the end of the season and those yellow jackets are going to be upset because it's getting cold, so keep your eyes open.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: If we're doing removals and we're in that kind of late summer, fall, uh, we always try to get bee sprays, or well, I'd say hornet and wash sprays cans that have a large range.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: We try to get ones that have the longest range possible.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: That way they don't have to be there right in the mix of it trying to spray a bald-faced hornet nest.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: The thing to think about is even know that yellow jackets and and bald-face hornets they can be sprayed by a homeowner.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: The question is, like, is it actually safe to you're talking a nest of 15,000 bees?
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Are you actually going to be able to spray that, or are you just putting yourself in the danger zone?
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, you're right.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_02: You're exactly right.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: And our our crews are not bee spray experts either.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that it's just not what we do.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so we can handle small nests, but uh, we're not going to be yeah, say that an apartment building, it's another place that we see nests from like yellow jackets somewhat frequently.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we don't have the capability to spray inside of a wall and take care of a large nest that's possibly in like a rotting deck or in inside of the structure.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: So in that case, it just makes sense to let the homeowner or property manager know and have just have it dealt with properly so that we're safe.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: I pulled into a place once and I looked at the window, and it was a bald-faced hornet's nest that wasn't round, but it was twice as big as one I'd ever seen, kind of through the air conditioner and window.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so I went inside of the place and I'm like, hey, I just want to let you know that's out there.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_02: And the guy said, Oh, yeah, Danny's gonna go out there and take care of it.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_02: I said, Don't have Danny go out and take care of it.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_02: Those are bald-faced hornets.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's gonna be nasty.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: Hire someone to go do that and get it done right.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I guess it's the same lesson we know about working on trees, too.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_02: Hire somebody that knows what they're doing to deal with the problem.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the and the issue is uh some of our tree crews inevitably are gonna have individuals on it that are that are highly allergic to bees.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: We have one here, so we're at at my shop.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we're at one out of nine field employees that we know is highly allergic, with I want to say two others that are kind of on that mid-range.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: So all three of those guys have epi pens.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you work with somebody that is in that situation, uh, we have to be on the same page as far as where they're keeping their epipen, because it could happen at any time.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we did, it's been luckily it's been about a decade, but we did have a crew member uh get stung by some ground bees, and he actually ended up uh having a severe reaction, lost consciousness, and had to call an ambulance to come get him.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: So that that's the the thing, you know.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: You you think you're safe, manly, I don't have to worry about a tiny bee, and then you know, even if you've been stung before, there's a first time for everything.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_02: So sure.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_02: Oh that that's such a great point.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh now, how about you?
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: Ever happened to you?
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I I've been sung many times.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I I don't know if it's you hear things about how you can actually build an allergy to bees.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so sometimes I swell up quite a bit if I get stung.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I would say of all the bee kinds or hornets we have up here, my worst reaction ever actually was from a honey bee.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: I swelled up, but you know, it could have just been my immune system was low at the time, or I let I got a heavy dose, the biggest bee in the beehive got me.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, it doesn't sound fun.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Tyson and Doug telling stories about getting stung by bees.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we've had another incident uh years ago uh where you can imagine we have a climber going up a monster tree to perform a removal, and he's brushing it out limb limb by limb from the bottom up.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, these are like Douglas firs, where it's a just a large spar of wood, and you're taking off whirls of branches.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: So he gets about halfway up the tree, takes another step up after cutting his last whirl, and then next thing you know, he's got a big bald-faced hornet nest right in his face.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, and in and they've started swarming, he's had his earplugs in, the saw's been running, the vibration, there's been a lot going on, so he didn't notice.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: So, could you guess what he did?
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: No, so he he didn't have a lot of choices there.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's either, you know, am I gonna repel down?
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: Am I gonna flee?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: Fight or fight or flight, right?
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so he chose fight.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: He took his chainsaw and he he just cut the branch off real quick.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, good good thinking, right?
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, great.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it got got the bees away from him, they fell down, you know, a good hundred feet.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: The nest explodes when it hits the ground, and now there's a giant swarm and he can't come down.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: And he he was so shocked, there's so much going on.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: He also didn't have the thought to tell the ground crew what was going on.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my god the ground crew is going in to try to get these limbs just a just a mess, you know.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: So that obviously that caused a big headache.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: That what they ended up doing is basically made an improvised little bee suit.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: They they ended up chipping the the branch that had the nest still attached to it, and then they just had to kind of wait.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: Luckily, the bees didn't trace back to the climber in in that situation.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: But uh talk about a situation that it was bad as it was, it but it could have gone even worse.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_02: So but we can laugh about it now, right?
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: He did not have to go away in an ambulance, so right.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_02: All right, Tyson.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_02: That's good stuff.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh very interesting and a topic we haven't covered before.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_02: As always, I appreciate your time and be careful up there in those trees, okay?
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_02: Sounds good.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_02: We will.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_02: All right, thanks, Tyson.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_02: Tune in every Thursday to the Talking Trees Podcast from the Davy Tree Expert Company.
• 20:45
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• 20:51
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