Let it bee: The women on a mission to save Mexico City’s bees

MEGAN JANETSKY

“Knife,” Adriana Velíz says with the concentration of a brain surgeon.

Shrouded in a white bee suit, she lies stretched out on the ground in one of Mexico City’s most buzzing districts.

Taking the knife, she pries open the side of a light post and flashes a glowing red lantern on a humming bee hive.

Velíz is on a mission to save the approximately 20,000 bees inside.

She heads a group of mostly women who are working hive by hive to relocate bees that would be exterminated if they remained in Mexico’s crowded capital city.

The group, Abeja Negra SOS, was born in 2018 when Velíz — a veterinarian working for the city government at the time — noticed that when authorities received calls about beehives, the automatic response was to exterminate the bees.

She and other colleagues began looking for an alternative.

“We do these rescues because