Virginia bee buster helps turn venom into treatment – Roanoke Times

Its a routine Saturday morning and youre mowing your lawn, lost in thought to the low hum of your machine. Suddenly, the hum grows louder, snapping you out of your post-pancake daydream. You check to see if you ran over a rock, but see a cloud of orange erupting from the ground instead.

Run.

Last month, Bobby Jessup mowed over a yellow jacket nest in his front lawn in southwest Roanoke County. He called The Bee Busters, a one-man service founded in 1998 that offers free hornet and yellow jacket removal.

George Waldenmaier, 62, of Accomack County represents Virginia for ALK Abello, a company headquartered in Denmark that uses insect venom for immunotherapy. It makes products that treat patients who are deathly allergic to wasps and bees. Waldenmaier said hes one of 30 ALK Abello representatives in the U.S.

Waldenmaier arrived on Jessups front lawn in July ready to collect yellow jackets, but he was annoyed that a skunk had gotten to their underground nest first. Now, the process wouldnt be as fun.

I hate skunks, Waldenmaier said. They are my biggest competitors. Skunks, bears and pigs can stand to be stung.

Because tree roots were growing over the nest, the skunk didnt get to all of the yellow jackets, so Waldenmaier inserted the tip of a hose with a black interior into the hole in the ground. The inside of the hose mimicked the inside of a predators mouth, luring the yellow jackets to sting it. What the yellow jackets didnt know was that the hose was connected to a vacuum, which sucked them into a trap.

Waldenmaier said all his wasp and bee catching tools are homemade, with instructions from ALK Abello.

After an hour, Waldenmaier zipped on his bee suit and stomped over the nest while blowing into it with a plastic tube. His goal was to antagonize any leftover nest defenders to surface and get sucked into the trap.

Theyre intolerant of being disturbed, Waldenmaier said.

Once the nest was empty, he took the trap to his truck and let carbon dioxide into it, knocking the wasps unconscious. Since the skunk beat him to the nest, there were only about 100 yellow jackets in the container. James Wilson, an extension agriculturist at Virginia Tech, said a yellow jacket nest can be home to more than 5,000 inhabitants, depending on the time of year.

After adding the gas to the trap, Waldenmaier put the yellow jackets into a cooler with dry ice, freezing them to preserve their venom. Later, hed ship his collection to a lab in Idaho, where the venom would be extracted and used for immunotherapy.

Immunotherapy works somewhat like a flu shot, Waldenmaier said. A series of tiny injections of venom are given to a patient over a period of time to encourage resiliency to future stings.

They work in terms of dilutions, Wilson said. You wouldnt want to start someone out with a large dose of venom, he said.

It can be close to curative, said Dr. Laura Dziadzio, a pediatric allergist at Carilion Clinic.

Depending on how allergic a person is to yellow jackets, even one sting can be deadly. Some people can stand up to 1,000 stings, Waldenmaier said. Still, thats only collectively a fifth of a gram of poison, so a tiny concentration of venom is lethal.

Dziadzio said a shortage of immunotherapy treatments over the last year affected patients. The shortage was due in part to the fact that ALK Abello shut down its production in October.

Tim Davis, vice president of ALK Abello in Post Falls, Idaho, declined to discuss the reason for the shutdown, though he said it had nothing to do with product safety. The company resumed operations this summer, Davis said. The lab in Idaho continued to collect wasp and hornet venom even during the shutdown in order to prevent future shortages, he said.

Most people get stung because they run over a nest with their lawn mower or weed-eater or stick their hands in one accidentally, Waldenmaier said. So check around your lawn before you start treating it, especially this year because the spring weather was optimal for wasp and bee growth. It can be deadly if a child or someone who cant run gets caught near a nest.

Its an intense yellow jacket year, Waldenmaier said. Scan for straight-line movement that means theres a nest.

An average workday for Waldenmaier involves going to 10 to 12 homes to collect wasps or bees, and he said he emptied out 32 yellow jacket nests in two days during a recent week.

Waldenmaier said the wasps and bees he catches cant be used for immunotherapy if theyre contaminated with insecticide or another type of chemical. If you find a nest, leave it be and call for help, because stinging pests are only harmful to humans when theyre antagonized.

Theyre really only a pest when they interact with humans, because otherwise theyre just doing their own thing, Wilson said.

More here:
Virginia bee buster helps turn venom into treatment - Roanoke Times