Bee-sieged

Thousands of bees swarm woman outside Wal-Mart

Galen Scott

gscott@weatherforddemocrat.com

Something about Weatherford resident Kristie Douglas appealed to a massive swarm of honey bees flying low over the South Main Wal-Mart parking lot Friday morning.

Douglas noticed the cloud of insects a few seconds before they surrounded her sedan.

“I was about to put my stuff in the trunk, and I thought it was June bugs. As they got closer, I thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s those killer bees.’ They were just all around me.”

Passing motorists honked their horns to see if Douglas was injured. One woman scrawled a sign, “Are you OK?” and pressed it against the window of her own vehicle. Douglas gave the woman a “thumbs-up” in response.

After a few minutes, the air thinned and Douglas exited her vehicle, thinking she could retrieve her merchandise safely. But when she saw thousands of bees had assembled in a mass beneath her shopping cart, she got back in the car.

The Weatherford Fire Department arrived at approximately 9:45 and pushed the bee-laden shopping cart to a collection point in the center of the parking lot, flagging the area with yellow caution tape.

“This time of year, the queen starts moving and the bees follow the queen,” said Weatherford Fire Lt. Mike Ingram. “When the queen gets tired and stops, everybody stops with her.”

Douglas said she has no idea why the apparently passive bees singled out her shopping cart, the contents of which were limited to a mail box and a few other dry goods. She said she wasn’t wearing perfume.

“It’s something I’ve never witnessed, other than in the movies,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Wal-Mart staff stood guard around the buggy collection point, warding off unwitting shoppers while waiting for beekeepers Keith and Jo Ellen Hays to arrive.

Keith Hays, who owns several bee hives in Poolville, said the bees outside Wal-Mart were not aggressive, a claim substantiated by the fact he suffered no apparent stings while pushing the bees off the shopping cart into a basket with a large paint brush.

“Right now, they’re only interested in finding a place for that queen,” he said. “If they had a place and you messed with them there, then they would get aggressive.”

If the bees at Wal-Mart had been “Africanized,” nobody would be anywhere near the shopping cart, according to Jo Ellen Hays.

“Africanized bees will follow you forever, and what kills people is so many of them attack; they just swarm you because they’re mean,” she said.

Keith Hays said the bees beneath Douglas’ shopping cart were Italian honey bees.

No stings were reported as a result of the incident.