When Jeff Smitten of JSK Consulting Ltd. and his decommissioning crew arrived at the Lockwood orphan well site just outside of Wainwright the summer of 2019, they expected a typical site walk. An above-ground pipeline ran from the orphan well into a gas metering shack, where the volume of gas going into a larger pipeline was tracked. As the team approached the wooden shack to investigate the work ahead, a buzzing sound got louder and louder.
Jeff and his team had stumbled upon a colony of about 30,000 honeybees, their honeycomb filling the space between the inner and outer panels of two building walls.
“We talked to the landowner and paused the work for a few days to find a beekeeper who could safely relocate the hive,” Jeff recalls. “Plus, a member of our team was allergic to bees, so we needed to be extra careful.”
Jeff came across a couple in the area who were just starting out as honey farmers and were looking for colonies. Not only are colonies expensive, but the previous summer had been a tough one: high winds and gusts had pushed some colonies to relocate.
With Jeff in charge of site safety, the honey farmers spent two hours prying apart the building walls so they could peel and scrape the honeycombs off, using special brushes to coax the bees into their new temporary home: two bee boxes. The key was to make sure the queen bee had been transferred to one of the boxes. If she was successfully moved, then the whole hive—including the many free bees buzzing about—would join her overnight, transitioning the entire colony.
Everyone left overnight to wait and see if the bees would return to the boxes and call them home. The next day, the returning team could see the transition had been a success. The beekeepers gathered up their boxes, and the decommissioning work began.