Why wall bees created a buzz in block of flats

A SWARM of bees became the unlikely new residents of an Angel estate when they settled on the outer wall of a block of flats.

“They weren’t there on Monday and they literally just appeared Tuesday morning,” said Tegan Harris, whose flat looks onto the sliver of brick between two windows where the queen and her workers set up camp on the Sutton estate, off Upper Street.

“At first I thought it was a massive cloud of midges, but as I got closer I could hear them – it sounded like when you plug in a microphone or a speaker and it buzzes before there’s anything playing.”

Ms Harris added: “My mum asked if I had seen any horsemen of the apocalypse.

“It felt like a cartoon, like when someone knocks down a beehive and they get chased around by hundreds of bees.

“I just kept looking at them thinking, where did they all come from? And why are they here on a random wall?”

But by Thursday morning the winged stingers were almost completely gone, as quickly as they had arrived.

Unbeknown to Ms Harris and other residents, beekeeper Peter Buckoke and his son came to collect the swarm at around midnight on Wednesday, brushing them off the wall, into a box, and driving them away.

“They’re on my bathroom roof at the moment,” Mr Buckoke said. “But I know someone who’d like to start beekeeping so I’ll be taking them to Hertfordshire in about 10 days.”

He explained that bees “swarm” to keep their colony going for the next generation.

Every spring, a queen takes a group of dedicated workers and splits off from her colony to form a new one, leaving behind a princess to take up the throne.

An important part of any beekeeper’s job, Mr Buckoke added, is to manipulate their colony to stop them swarming, so as to maximise the colony’s size and thus the amount of honey you can harvest from it.

But why did this swarm choose to land on “a random wall”?

He explained: “The queen does very little flying – she’s not very good at it, she’s got a big body and her wings aren’t that big, so she isn’t able to fly very far.

“That queen must have run out of oomph and decided she was going to land and hang onto a wall.

“Then the swarm will send off scout bees to look for where they’re going to live – a box, a chimney, a hollow tree, somewhere they could set up home.”

In this case, Mr Buckoke swept in before the bees found another permanent home.

Hopefully they will be safer and happier in the Home Counties.

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