Police have been ridiculed for sending a team of officers to deal with a swarm of bees that had landed on a traffic light pole.
A photo posted on social media shows officers and a PCSO looking flummoxed as they stare at the cluster of pollinators in the centre of Winchester, Hampshire.
The bees had gathered on the post in the Cathedral city as they waited to find out where their new home would be – a practice known as swarming, where a group breaks off from the main hive to follow a new queen.
On Facebook, one resident joked that it had taken the city’s ‘finest’ to protect the ‘queen’.
There were plenty of puns in the comments with locals saying ‘let’s bee having you’, and ‘hot buzz’ – a play on the slang term ‘hot fuzz’ which was used as the title for Edgar Wright’s police comedy starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.
Others suggested it was a ‘sting operation’ or a ‘honey trap’ that would require police to ‘(honey) comb the area’.
Someone else added it was a ‘worthy cause’ as bees ‘do more good than people’.
Swarming season occurs between May and July and can involve thousands of bees, the creatures hang in a cluster whilst ‘scouts’ go and find a new home for the breakaway colony.
Police have been ridiculed for sending a team of officers to deal with a swarm of bees that had landed on a traffic light pole
A photo posted on social media shows two officers and a PCSO looking flummoxed as they stare at the cluster of pollinators in the centre of Winchester, Hampshire
One of Britain’s leading beekeepers warned earlier this month the heatwave could create a ‘nectar tsunami’ that triggers a rapid swarming event.
Laurence Edwards, 39, said: ‘After the recent hot spell, beekeepers across the UK are seeing an explosion in swarming activity and the soaring temperatures over the next few days could potentially result in a massive increase in bee swarms,’ he explained.
‘What the public will see is a “cloud” of up to 50,000 bees. The sky turns black. The sound is deafening.’
While this sounds like the start of a horror film, Mr Edwards maintains that the swarming bees are ‘generally not aggressive.’
He added: ‘Swarming bees are generally not aggressive. They have no home to defend, no reason to sting.’
Mr Edwards, who runs Black Mountain Honey, explained that swarming is the honeybees’ ‘way of surviving’.
‘It’s how they reproduce on a colony level,’ he said.
‘When a hive becomes overcrowded, the old queen leaves with thousands of workers to find a new home.
‘It’s not chaos, it’s one of the most extraordinary natural behaviours on the planet.’
Usually, beekeepers actively manage their colonies to prevent swarming.
However, the UK heatwave could have provided the perfect conditions for a mass swarming event.
‘Heatwaves can trigger a “nectar tsunami” that saturates the inside of the beehive with this sweet, sugary solution,’ Mr Edwards warned.
‘This is generally good for bees but if the beekeeper hasn’t provided enough space for this bounty of nectar, it can trigger rapid swarming events, even in urban areas.’
