When lightning struck down a very large basswood tree in Campbellsport, Wisconsin, last week, it displaced a small colony of honeybees that had made their home in the hollow trunk.
Public Works officials set up barricades with signs reading “Danger: Bees” and police kept people away from the site while a call went out to Dennis Haber, “The Bee Guy,” to come and deal with the insects…
It’s a fairly typical scenario, and one that we’ve all seen on our local news programs. And the appearance of honeybees outside their hive, too often, seems to be reported in highly dramatic terms — Swarm of bees stops traffic on Main Street!
I can’t help thinking, it sounds like something out of a sci-fi horror “B movie”!
Consider the facts:
- Less than 1 percent of the population has a systemic allergy to bee stings.
- Bees will defend their queen and their hive, but a swarm has no hive to protect. By nature, unlike some other insects with stingers, honeybees are not aggressive without a good reason.
- A honey bee can sting a person only once; the bee will die when she stings.
And yet, it’s not uncommon for otherwise capable adults to verge on near-hysteria when faced with a cluster of bees.
Fight or Flight!
In Florida, for example, a few summers ago, a very small swarm of honeybees settled onto a backyard swing set in a suburban backyard.
The occupants of the home, rather than waiting for the bees to move on to another location, threw tennis balls at the swarm to try to dislodge it.
When that got “pretty boring,” they improvised an incinerator and burned out the bees with several quarts of gasoline, high-octane gasoline, and paint thinner.
More recently and closer to home, the Atlantic Lottery folks came out with a television commercial — it’s on the air now, in fact — showing a fully-suited beekeeper running in panic from his own bees!
It’s that grade-B horror film, all over again…
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