Honeybees need friends right now, but spring swarms can be a buzzkill

By now everyone knows the plight of the honeybee: Populations have died off at alarming rates since about 2006.

To underscore the problem, General Mills Canada has temporarily removed its iconic bee mascot, Buzz, from the front of Honey Nut Cheerios boxes to launch its new #BringBackTheBees campaign.

Yes, bees need our love. People are encouraged to plant wildflowers to keep them buzzing, to avoid pesticides and to let the dandelions grow in the yard to give the bees snack food.

General Mills even made a video for people to share.

But this time of year it’s hard to embrace them with open arms, because swarm season is a major buzzkill.

Last week an 85-year-old man died after being stung about 200 times by a swarm of bees in south Texas. Also last week swarming bees scared the bejesus out of folks at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, Calif., when a swarm invaded the flag stand.

NASCAR (wisely) pulled the flag man out of there for practice runs.

Swarming bees also created a real-life horror movie scene in Glendale, Ariz., earlier this month when they attacked a baby girl in a stroller.

Neighbors heard the mother’s child screaming. “My baby, my baby, my baby!”

Remarkably, the girl was only stung once.

Firefighters sprayed the tree where the bees were swarming with foam to suffocate them because they were deemed a public safety hazard. A swarm of angry bees met the same fate in Scottsdale, Ariz., in early March after they swarmed and attacked a woman’s pet dogs in her backyard. Three of the dogs, which neighbors said were covered with bees during the attack, died.

Swarming is what honeybees do in spring or early summer. It’s the queen and some of her worker bees looking for a new home. Bee experts say that as scary as the bees might appear, bees are safest when they’re swarming because they’re not aggressively defending a nest or honey.

That’s why beekeepers encourage homeowners not to spray hives with pesticides. Some exterminators refuse to destroy honeybee swarms. FOBs (Friends of Bees) are going to lengths to avoid harming swarming bees.

Last week a police officer in Brookhaven, Ga., put on a beekeeper’s veil to handle one swarm. He responded to a call where a man had fallen and broken his leg while trying to safely herd the swarm. The man was covered in bees when police arrived on the scene.

This week more than 80,000 swarming honeybees had to be evicted from a gated community in Lakeland, Fla.

Local beekeepers called in for the removal job carefully vacuumed the bees into a box to be relocated to a new home so they can “live out their life and do what they’re supposed to do,” said one of the beekeepers.

Royals manager Ned Yost was just as adamant about being kind to the bees when, on March 8, the team’s spring training game against the Angels in Tempe, Ariz., was briefly delayed because of a swarm of bees.

Still sore that a similar swarm had been exterminated at the Surprise ballpark last spring, which he called “mass bee genocide,” Yost was adamant that the bees be safely removed this time.

“They’re just honeybees, man,” he said. “There’s a decline in honeybees. We need ’em.”

Earlier this week beekeepers used great care to remove a bee-infested tree from a business area in San Antonio.

Shop owner Rachel Fuentes thought those were wasps living deep inside a cavity of a nearly dead pecan tree in front of her building.

“I thought they’d sting the customers of the grocery next door or some child would get swarmed, so after putting it off for months, I called the city,” she said. “I thought they’d just come out and spray them, but then we found out they’re honeybees.”

The city called in the American Honey Bee Protection Agency so they could do the removal “the right way,” said one city official.

They were proud that the trunk of the dying tree — with about 7,0000 European honey bees safely sealed inside — was removed with no loss of bee life. The bees were slated to become part of a honey bee exhibit at a local zoo.

Said one business owner: “This is a great effort to save the bee population.”

This story was originally published March 23, 2016 at 12:59 PM with the headline "Honeybees need friends right now, but spring swarms can be a buzzkill."