Out & About: Upper Valley beekeepers remove bees from Orford church’s roof

ORFORD — During rainstorms that started July 11, and continued through last weekend, water poured in through the ceiling in the vestibule of the Orford Congregational Church, pooling on the floor below.

Last Sunday, a small group of church members used a ladder to reach the area on the roof where they believed the leak originated.

“We figured we’d go up there and see some boards ajar,” said Jim Hansen, who joined the church around a year ago after moving to Orford.

What they found instead were thousands of bees that seemed intent on staying in a narrow space between a small turret and the roof’s eave, around 40 feet from the ground and a difficult spot to reach by a ladder.

“How are we going to get them out of there? That’s a tough place for them to be,” Hansen recalled thinking when he spotted the bees.

The congregants looked in the attic on the other side of the roof, but the pollinators had not found their way inside. “It’s really impressive, those layers, those veins of comb they’ve built in there,” Hansen said.

Church members made a decision to try to save the bees if they could, Hansen said, adding that they were “aware of the pressure … bees are under.”

From April 1, 2024, to April 1, 2025, beekeepers in the U.S. lost 55.6% of their honeybee colonies, according to the annual U.S. Beekeeping Survey. It is the highest annual loss since 2010-2011, the year losses were first tracked.

Last Monday evening, Melissa Arnesen-Trunzo, a member of the church who lives in Thetford, reached out to a couple of beekeepers about moving the bees elsewhere and they told her it couldn’t be done. Then she turned to social media.

“I didn’t want to give up,” Arnesen-Trunzo said.

Dozens of people responded, encouraging the church to do what it could to save them.

“It was beautiful that so many people cared about the bees,” Arnesen-Trunzo said.

Among the people who saw Arnesen-Trunzo’s Facebook post was Cassia Smith, of Orford. She volunteered her husband, Charles Smith Jr., a member of the Orford Selectboard, who started beekeeping during the COVID-19 pandemic about five years ago.

Smith was intrigued. He reached out to his beekeeping mentor, Jennifer Mercer, a third-generation beekeeper who runs a Lebanon farm called Black Dog Bees & Maple Trees with her husband, Jason Weale. She agreed to help.

Late Wednesday afternoon, Mercer and Smith met a group of helpers, onlookers and church members at Orford Congregational Church. Mercer did not charge the church for her services — her payment would be taking the bees back to her farm to help repopulate her own bee boxes.

Mercer lost all the bees in 14 of her hives over the winter. She estimated that she lost at least 700,000 bees. This spring, she had to purchase bees to repopulate her hives.

“This will be interesting,” Mercer said as she walked closer to the church, peering up at the roof and the bees assembling around it.

Occasionally, a honeybee would fly downward, land on an observer, then rejoin its brood above.

Mercer, known as a master beekeeper, completed an intensive training course to earn a certificate from Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Department of Entomology.

While Mercer performs bee removals once or twice a year, she’d never had to use a lift to do so before. Smith and his father, Charles Smith Sr., had rented the lift to aid the beekeepers in reaching the colony.

The younger Smith and Mercer donned white beekeeping suits and helmets that prevent bees from stinging them, and heavy duty gloves. They gathered supplies including bee boxes, knives to cut the honeycomb away and a canister of smoke meant to calm the bees, to put in the lift.

Smith operated the device and it took a few tries to get in the right position, close enough to the roof without scraping the church.

“It’s a full colony of bees,” Mercer said, estimating that there were easily 20,000 bees there. “I suspect they came from somewhere nearby.”

Typically, honeybees swarm to a temporary spot in the spring — sometimes a tree or other structure — before sending out scouts to find a spot for a permanent hive. The space on the church roof was likely meant to be a stopover before they found a more sheltered location, like a hollowed out tree.

“Something caused them to not find a permanent home,” she said, speculating that they were affected by weather conditions such as rain.

The pair got to work, slowly cutting away the honeycomb and placing it into the boxes. The 10 or so onlookers gasped as a pile of honey plopped onto the lower roof. Their responses of awe continued as Mercer and Smith pulled out large pieces of honeycomb.

“Mommy, the bees are really not happy,” 4-year-old Keena Trunzo-Gong observed to her mother, Arnesen-Trunzo, who agreed with her daughter’s observation.

Mercer encouraged observers to try the honey she gathered in a bucket, being mindful of the bees who were also snacking on it. Her plan was to take the honey and feed it to the bees as they resettled in Lebanon.

She hoped they had managed to get the queen bee, who was likely hidden in the layers of honeycomb. Retaining the queen would allow the colony to continue on as is in a new location; if not, they would create a new queen from eggs the previous one produced. Mercer said she should know for certain in the next few days, once the bees got settled.

After removing all the honeycomb they could, the pair went back up in the lift with a vacuum to collect the remaining bees.

“I got as many as I could,” Mercer said after getting off the lift and hoisting up the sealed bucket containing around 15,000 bees. “You can hear them buzzing if you put your ear up to it.”

Mercer then loaded up the supplies — and thousands of bees — into her Subaru to drive back to Lebanon.

“Quite an adventure, I’ll tell you that,” the younger Smith said. He said he got into beekeeping after reading about the threats honeybees face, including from the Varroa mite, a parasite that kills bees. He wanted to do his part to help the pollinators.

“It was so great to see the community pull together and we need more of this in all our surrounding communities and the nation to that point,” he wrote in a follow up email.

On Friday morning, Mercer went to see how the bees were doing in their new hive. While she didn’t spot the queen, she saw several newly hatched bees and new honeycomb that the colony had built since Wednesday evening.

“They’re all good indications that she’s probably there,” Mercer said in a Friday morning phone interview. “Especially that they’re really calm, that’s a good sign.”

The removal from the church was by far the most challenging one Mercer has done. She also found it exciting and heartwarming.

“I’m glad that it all worked out in the end,” she said. Church members plan on further examining the roof in the coming days to locate the leak and come up with a plan to fix it.

Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.