Father, son relocate 40,000 bees
Swarm one of the biggest they’ve seen
Wearing only a T-shirt, blue jeans and sneakers — and no gloves — Nathan Thompson reached up and gingerly pulled down the branch of a crepe myrtle tree as his father leaned in and clipped a branch holding a swarm of about 40,000 bees.
The pair of beekeepers said the swarm had set up shop in a grassy area at a townhouse community along Thomas Jefferson Place in Fredericksburg, Va.
A resident called law enforcement to report the bees, but an animal control officer realized the third-generation beekeeping family might be of more assistance.
The swarm was about the size of a small child, measuring a metre tall and almost a metre wide. It weighed about 18 kilograms.
Even for them, it was one of the biggest swarms of honey bees the Thompsons had seen in their decades raising and caring for bees.
It took hours to make sure all of the bees relocated to beehive boxes before they were taken to Thompson’s house.
“We had a moment of reverence, admiration and ‘holy crap,’ ” Nathan Thompson said Wednesday as he recalled the incident.
“We definitely thought, ‘That’s a big one.’ ”
Although Thompson and his dad didn’t count the bees one by one, he said he is fairly confident that given the size of the swarm, it likely contained about 40,000 of them. The bee rescue unfolded about 6:40 p.m. May 17, when Anthony McCall, an animal-control officer, got a call from a resident for help getting rid of a swarm of bees.
McCall is a “self-admitted ‘chicken’ when it comes to bees,” his office said in a statement. But he remembered chatting with Thompson, who used to work as a deputy for the sheriff ’s office, and recalled that he was a beekeeper on the side.
Thompson is now interim chief of the nearby Aquia Harbour Police Department and has been in law enforcement for 13 years.
McCall called Thompson, whose grandfather also was a beekeeper, and asked whether he could help. Thompson, 33, and his 70-year-old father loaded equipment in a truck and drove to the bee swarm.
With a light veil over his face, Thompson pulled down the branch as his dad cut the branch and the swarm fell into the box below. The bulk of the bees went into the beehive boxes below, but some landed on the surrounding sheet.