Susan Angus had a startling scene awaiting her when she came out of the Bingo hall in Nanaimo’s University Village shopping centre Friday.
The passenger side of Angus’s car was blanketed by a swarm of honey bees.
“Why me?” Angus asked when she saw her vehicle.
Witnesses said the swarm arrived just around 11 a.m. after first alighting in a nearby tree branch before moving on to Angus’s car.
It wasn’t long before word got out on social media and caught the attention of Mike Massey, a local beekeeper, who arrived with his wife Calinda, bee suits, a hive box and other equipment to collect the bees.
“I’m having a really difficult time finding the queen,” Massey said, as he searched the nooks and crannies of the car’s exterior, trying to discover where the queen had hunkered down.
If he could catch her and get her in the hive box the rest of the swarm would follow, but she was playing hard to get.
Angus handed Massey the keys to her car, deciding to wait things out with some more rounds of Bingo.
By about 1 p.m. Massey opted to suck up much of the swarm with vacuum cleaner, clearing much of it from Angus’s car. They still had no luck finding the queen and Angus reported she hadn’t had any luck at Bingo either.
Meanwhile, Mark Schilling, an executive member of the Nanaimo Beekeepers Club, showed up to see if he could help out and joined in on the search for the swarm’s queen.
Even though the bees numbered in their thousands and were buzzing excitedly around a large area of the parking lot, they showed no aggression to the beekeepers or passersby and no one suffered any stings.
Massey said even if he couldn’t find the queen, he could save most of the bees, which he identified them as Italian honey bees, and could insert an new queen to start a new hive.
Calinda Massey said Monday that she and her husband managed to capture about one fourth of the swarm and it is now living in their back yard with a substitute queen.
The couple also captured another swarm from a tree branch in Harewood on Saturday.
