Beeing there

There have been plenty of crazy things that have happened to me at work, but pretty much the only one that involved nature was when a bat was flying around the office at the H.H. Brown Shoe Company in Worcester, where I worked one summer. (That office job was my first promotion. I had been working on the shop floor, finishing the seams of combat boots, when – because I wore glasses, and because I could say “no work this Saturday” in Spanish – I was deemed office material.)

Anyway, one of the sales guys went after the bat with a tennis racket, and we were all saved.

Other than the rats that plagued Ye Olde Union Oyster House back in the day, the bat out of the hell that was H.H. Brown was the only time when nature crossed paths with my work place.

Most of my work, however, has been done in a hermetically sealed office environment, where most of the critters you had to contend with were of the human kind: jackasses, snakes in the grass, vultures, sharks...

If you work in the great outdoors, however, your odds of getting involved in some sort of weather-flora-fauna-related incident are, of course, far higher than in the white collar world. As the folks at Gloucester’s Marine Railways shipyard found out last week when:

…25,000 honeybees, moving as one, took over the shipyard Wednesday afternoon. The 50-foot long, 25-foot wide swarm covered a corner of the yard before coagulating on a piece of scaffolding into a single, basketball-sized mass…Gloucester and the surrounding communities of Essex County are scattered with professional and amateur beekeepers, but Marine Railways had never before been the subject of a summer swarm.(Source: Boston.com)

Fortunately, Marine Railways has a fast-thinking and well-prepared general manager. Viking Gustafson – great name, by the way - was at the ready with an epi pen. Plus she wisely called in first responders – in this case, the Gloucester FD – to confer with them on the best course: freeze them out, burn them out, drown them out.

“All of these options were deemed not to be in the best interest of all involved, especially the bees,” [Deputy Fire Chief Miles] Schlichte wrote in his report.

Given the honey bee crisis in this country –  for some as yet unknown reason (climate change? pollution?), the population is declining radically, which has implications for fruit and nut crops, not to mention honey  - I’m delighted that Chief Schlichte made this call.

Another call was to the animal control officer who, after conferring with Gustafson and Schlicte, recommended letting nature take its course, and wait for the swarm to leave when it damned well felt like it.

Unfortunately, another element of nature was also taking its course, and that was pelting rain, which caused the swarm to just hunker down. At this point,

…concern grew that they might make a new home in a nearby electrical box.

Which could have meant something shocking happening to them.

Eventually, they – the humans, not the bees – got a hold of Greg Morrow, a local bee keeper.

By the time Morrow rolled in, raising comfort levels with his truck with bees painted on the doors and a beehive and honeycomb with which to woo the swarm, the bees had, in fact, settled on that electric box that everyone was worried about.

Morrow was able to coax the bees into their new temporary home. Well, coax may not be the right word, he “used a piece of cardboard to shovel the bees into it.”

Morrow then awayed with the bees, which will – I guess – be restored to the original hives owner, when found.

Morrow said swarming “is a very natural phenomenon, it’s how the bees reproduce.” He added, “Once the impulse is in the hive, it’s pretty hard to get it out.”

Most hives swarm around the summer solstice, when the pollen is heavy and the nectar is flowing, he said.

And with the violent rain, it was any port, or, in this case, shipyard, in a storm.

Fortunately, none of the shipyard workers was stung. Only one of the firefighters. And, as:

…Schlichte wrote in his report. “The only fatality was to the bee doing the stinging.”

Just another day at the none office…