One bee in a house is no problem. The bee is escorted from the premises in a glass or shooed through the door. When there’s a few thousand of the bee’s friends making themselves at home in your roof, it’s a different situation.

That’s the situation Terry and Alice McGarrah, of Montesano, faced. Their home, remodeled on the inside, also needed a new roof. The roof, however, had about five colonies of bees — each with thousands of bees in it — and no roofer would touch it.

The bees, said Alice McGarrah, came to the house off Minkler Road about five to seven years ago. The bees didn’t bother the McGarrahs and they didn’t bother the bees. Occasionally, the bees would swarm, an intense and interesting affair but no one was stung. Everyone, bees and people, continued on with life.

But once the interior remodeling of the home was completed recently, the McGarrahs needed to replace the roof on their three-story home. The bees had to go.

“They are part of our home,” Alice McGarrah said. “But we can’t afford to have them around with the roofers.”

Brian Melton, of Armageddon Pest Control, agreed with the McGarrahs that the bees had to go. With honeybees in crisis, though, it was hoped that the hives could go to a local beekeeper. Melton contacted local apiarists but none accepted the offer of scaling a three-story house to collect honeybees.

Melton then contacted Rob Jenkins of Ethel, Wash., the “Bee Wrangler” and owner of Bee Wrangler Honey.

Jenkins is not just an apiarist but also a bee advocate. The insects are important pollinators, their work helping to feed not just humans but animals. Without bees and other pollinators, the food supply would dwindle in about two years said Jenkins.

“It’s kind of amazing and spooky, but if that little bug dies, it’s taking all of us with him,” Jenkins said.

After Melton explained the McGarrahs’ situation to him, he and his friends decided they had to help the bees and the McGarrahs, too. Jenkins’ friends are not, he stresses, in a formal bee club.

“We’re just a group of friends that like to go out and play with bees,” Jenkins said. The friends include Ed Carter, of Winlock, Leonard and Cheryl Freese of Yacolt, Debbi Cornell of Winlock, and Jan and David Opsitnick of Toledo.

On Wednesday, Sept. 1, the beekeeping friends gathered at the McGarrahs’ home and looked up. There were five visible colonies of bees, the white combs hanging from the eaves of the roof. One, about two feet in length, hung down from the roof by about a foot, and Jenkins declared it “the trophy.”

“We broke all our rules, coming here,” Jenkins said. He said they would not usually venture this far from home, travelling over 60 miles to collects bees. The time of year, almost fall, was also not ideal for hive collection, with the season usually running in the hot summer months ending around July. The sky was overcast and just like people, sunless days make bees grumpy.

With conditions less than perfect, the beekeepers got down to work, collecting hive boxes from the backs of trucks, sorting equipment, including knives for cutting the combs, liquid smoke to calm the bees, and suiting up in white coveralls with hoods covered in black netting.

Jenkins and Ed Carter hopped into a man lift the McGarrahs had rented for the day, and hoisted themselves to the first hive.

Jan Opsitnick said the bee keepers wouldn’t know how deep the colony went until the roof was opened up. She explained that white comb was newer and the dark, almost black comb was much older. The keepers, Opsitnick said, would carve out the comb from the roof in blocks, ensnare the queen and transport all the bees, or as many as they could, back to hives in Lewis County.

Once there, the bees would need extra care and food because with winter approaching, the bees could not collect their own.

On the man lift, Jenkins and Carter cut into the roof and a few hundred bees buzzed lazily around them. The men lowered buckets of honeycomb down to be sorted and placed by the waiting beekeepers on the ground.

Dark, thick honey dripped from the darker combs, which would later be rendered for its wax. Dave Opsitnick said the wild honey was completely different than the honey sold at the store and offered a taste. The wild honey was light, sweet and fragrant.

He also said that if the bees became aggressive, they would give off a pheromone that smelled liked “angry honey” and to run like mad.

The beekeepers worked for about 11 hours collecting all the bees in the McGarrahs roof, from 10 in the morning to 9 at night, working in a downpour of rain. The bees in the large hive were more aggressive and Jenkins was stung about 30 times but he said he was glad to help.

“It was successful for both the bees and the people,” Jenkins said. “We couldn’t ask for a better result.”

Jenkins said they only removed three colonies as two were abandoned by the bees and just had old comb exposed. They ended up with six and a half hive boxes of bees and he also vacuumed up about five pounds of bees. Five pounds of bees is equivalent to about 20,000 or so bees. Give or take one or two. Jan Opsitnick said the large hive would probably be encased in glass and be used at educational events. Only one queen was captured, and Jenkins said the other two queens may have been hiding or escaped.

Jenkins and his friends do not charge for their bee removal services but they do get to keep the bees. He also said the McGarrahs were exceptional hosts, firing up the barbecue and offering lunch, dinner, snacks and drinks.

On Monday, Alice McGarrah said the house was quiet. One bee was in the house but she hadn’t seen many others. She and Terry were grateful for the work done by the beekeepers.

“We had been trying to remove the bees for a long time but we wanted to do it humanely,” McGarrah said. She said she would call the roofers in the morning.