Pardon the pun, but it didn’t take too long last Tuesday for the buzz downtown to get around.
Late Tuesday morning, calls and emails poured into The Citizen offices about a large number of bees swarming next to the Century Center, specifically in the Foster Holly (Ilex x attenuata) on the northeast corner of Main and Greensboro streets.
As thousands of honeybees swirled in and out of the bushes, onlookers did a bit of swarming as well.
“It was a pretty amazing sight,†said Brendan Moore, facilities administrator for the Century Center. He took in the spectacle and the rapid response of the local beekeeping community, but, he said, “I did it from afar.â€
Paul Hellwig, the town’s landscaping and grounds supervisor, said and “went running up there.â€
Hellwig said that in 30 years on the job, he’d never had to deal with a swarm before. “On my way, I was thinking, ‘What am I going to do when I get there?’â€
He called the Orange County Cooperative Extension Service, which directed him to the Orange County Beekeepers Association. He finally reached a beekeeper and very quickly a swarm alert hit the association’s listserv.
Although he’d been told that swarming bees are generally not aggressive, Hellwig decided to close off the sidewalk.
“I wasn’t worried about them stinging anyone. I was more worried that a person on a bicycle or someone jogging would be startled by the bees and try to avoid them and swerve into traffic,†he said.
Hellwig said he was impressed by how quickly the beekeepers responded.
Kirk Right said he and Scotty McLean of McLean Builders, who are both beekeepers, got a call about the swarm around 1 p.m. from Mike Sparrow of Sparrow’s Plumbing. They grabbed their gear and McLean got a bee box ready.
Right said McLean estimated there were more than 20,000 bees in the swarm. “It was a basketball-sized clump,†Right said.
“We filled up the box, threw them in the back of the truck and took them out to a place in White Cross. I checked this morning and they were doing fine.â€
Right estimates that he and McLean were able to get about 80 percent of the bees.
Hellwig said he’s been told the rest will likely stay for a little while because the scent of the queen — now residing in western Orange County — is still around.
“There was a clump about the size of a tennis ball this morning,†he said Wednesday.
Bees tend to swarm this time of year as hives swell in size and become overcrowded. It’s a natural occurrence and part of the creatures’ reproductive cycle.
Hellwig said the local beekeepers were very helpful and probably saved the town from having to extract the hive from somewhere higher up on the building should the swarm have found the Century Center a suitable spot for a new home.
For more information, please visit the North Carolina State Beekeepers Association at ncbeekeepers.org or the Orange County Beekeepers Association at www.theocba.org