Saturday Supplement: How Wright English rescued about 100 bees!
This is the true story of how Wright English went from one woman and 2 cats, to one woman, 2 cats, and roughly 100 bees (they are too fast to count).
About a week ago a man from a village close to me posted in local social media that he had some bumble bees (the fluffy round bees) living in a bird nesting box on the side of his shed. He wanted to have the bees removed, but did not want to hurt them (good man), as the bees scared him and his family. Of course, as a bee-loving crazy person, I contacted the local man and said “I will come and get them! Just let them stay until Friday night!”, he said thank you and no problem, and we met Friday night.
So, I arrived at the house in my tiny Fiat 500 with some cardboard, and some sticky tape, and a love of bees. We said hello, went round to the back of his home and I met roughly 100 new friends. It was 21:30 because bees go to bed at night (so cute!). Like an English-teaching bee-capturing ninja, I climbed a ladder, put cardboard over the door of the bird house and taped the bee colony up. Success! What a professional! I then try and take the bird box off of the shed. This is a lot less professional. We didn’t realise there was also a hole in the back. Disaster! There were 15 or so escape bees. One is particularly unhappy with me. This bee stung me in the forehead… I can’t complain I did lock them in their house, and then tried to steal it. After a few minutes of hopping around on the floor trying to hold card on the house and tape it at the same time I managed to lock the remaining friends inside.
All roughly 101 of us drove home. We got back and its was total darkness. I had to try and shove the bird box up on the shed, and survive. It took a while, I got it on the shed, the bees were making it clear they were VERY upset with my life choices, and the house was buzzing like a high voltage electricity line. I opened their front door, and ran in my house and closed the door before any of my new buddies decided to sting me too.
I was worried that one of the 15 escaped bees could have been the queen. If you don’t take the queen the colony can really suffer. Now my bee buddies have been with me for a few days I can see they are wild tree bees and we definitely have the queen! They live right above a big plot full of wild flowers to they have an en-suite restaurant. Please welcome something like 100 new bee buddies to Wright English! Yay bees!
