Beeing Healthy in Oakland

On Wednesday of last week, a week that was already super shitty, I came home to an infestation of bees coming in and out of a small gap in the siding of my building, directly above my door. I called my landlord who said she’d drop by with some spray. When my upstairs neighbor came home a couple hours later and had 30 or so bees in her kitchen, the problem seemed like it might be getting worse. Things subsided in the early evening without having to use the spray, but because there were a dozen or so bees lingering, we thought it’d be best to call a bee pro to come by for a look.

Khaled Almaghafi visited early Thursday morning. When my landlord, upstairs neighbor and I met just outside my door at 9am, Almaghafi told us that it appeared that the queen had (literallly) left the building and that the five or so bees that were left coming in and out were lost stragglers. When we thought he was about to pull away in his pick-up truck, Almaghafi came back to the front steps with a five-gallon bucket filled with a busted hive (and some dead and dying bees) he’d just removed from a clients house. He invited us to try some fresh natural honey by wiping our fingers over the waxy honeycomb. Man was that stuff good. Sensing our delight, he continued to break off chunks for us to eat whole. My landlord totally got down and seemed to ignore the inevitable sticky aftermath.

Almaghafi, a Yemeni immigrant who’s been in the area since 1986, was a really interesting guy. He studied business administration at UC Davis in the 80s and seems to have a great gig going–when he’s not answering emergency calls to remove bee hives and infestations, Almaghafi is managing his own bees and harvesting their honey to sell at his shop, Bee Healthy Honey Shop. Bee Healthy is on the outskirts of Tastyville at 3622 Telegraph Ave., and Almaghafi sells his goods at the Temescal Farmers Market on Sundays.

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