Thursday's column

The morning buzz in the newsroom Wednesday stemmed as much from the strong coffee as it did from talk about the million or so bees that were living in the walls of a San Marino estate.
</DC>I wanted to see the home and drove down there late morning, early afternoon. It was pretty easy to find.
Usually if a truck or van is parked in front of a home in San Marino it belongs to the gardener or maintenance supervisor.
It was the news vans that attracted me to the Stathatos’ home, hidden behind a 20-foot-high hedge. I guess you could say reporters were drawn to the story like bees to honey. After all, bees had been in the walls and left behind hundreds of pounds of honey that wasn’t going to be extracted.
The story apparently isn’t all that unusual, according to CBS2/KCAL9 reporter Suraya Fadel, outside with a cameraman who looked like he’d rather be covering a homicide downtown.
I overheard her trying to sell the story to an editor.
“Well we can use this as a portion of a bigger story about bees inside people’s homes all over the Southland.”
The editor wasn’t buying and shipped Fadel and the forlorn cameraman off to another, probably grittier assignment in the heart of the big city.
But not before homeowner Helen Stathatos, heading to a luncheon in Studio City and wearing a floral print scarf came out to talk about her former tenants.
The home itself, a two-story Tudor-style affair, looked like stately Wayne Manor, home of reclusive millionaire Bruce Wayne (and several thousand bats).
Beyond the gate and set back from the street by an amazing garden, full of mature trees and exotic flowers, the Stathatos home has been an on-again, off-again hive for 25 years. <NO1>Mrs.<NO>Stathatos said she believes they have a certain symbolism.
“We treat it as a token of good luck,” she said. “it’s a blessing in a way.”
Stathatos was also careful to note that the bees were treated humanely.
“The men who came here, they take them out to the wilderness and release them. They don’t destroy them.”
I got to thinking about that. The Stahatos home was once a wilderness after all. Perhaps these bees were descendants of bees that nested in the oaks on the knoll above the home.
The oaks, hundreds of years old, once lined the trail used by the Gabrieleno Indians making their way from San Gabriel Mission to El Molino, the old mill, just a short distance away.
Then again, perhaps bees’ ancestors pollinated the trees and flowers back when Gen. George Patton was a kid playing army in the wilderness of an undeveloped San Marino.
Then I got to thinking about the so-called impending extinction of honey bees. Scientists say it’s happening and they may be all gone in our lifetimes.
But until that happens, for Helen Stathatos and her family, the squatters that got an unceremonious boot this week are “not the enemy. They’re just plain old bees.”