Erica Thompson, a Texas beekeeper, posted a video on Twitter on Friday and it was already viewed nearly two million times. They all watched Thompson transport a bee colony to a new destination with her bare hands. Bees spent at least two years under the wooden floor of a barn in the garden.
“A normal Tuesday for me,” Thompson said afterwards, amazed at the amazing reactions to the video. Few humans seem to have watched with indirect fear how a beekeeper removed the bee colony from under the wooden floor without any protection after more than two years. “The owner wanted the pesticides to come, but the tenants insisted on saving the bees, so I was called,” Thompson says in the video.
Only when she raised a shelf from the ground did she see the size of the colony. I started transferring the bees to a beehive without any protective clothing. Thompson just took “groups” of bees on her hand and placed them in the hive. “Generally speaking, honeybees will not sting you,” Thompson said. “I hope people get a different idea of the bees or learn something about them by watching these types of videos.”
The next mission was to get the queen out of the enormous crowd. “The queen is the main bee in the colony,” Thompson explains. “She lays all the eggs for the colony and the other bees follow her.” “Often the entire colony will follow the queen to the new destination.” Fifteen minutes later, the beekeeper grabbed the queen and she was safe – thanks to a special “queen clip” – in the new beehive. “The clip is made in such a way that the worker bees who help the queen can still take care of her, because they are smaller than her.”
The bees also gave signals to each other so that they could all quickly find their new home. Thompson left the colony overnight to give all the bees time to move. The whole process was completed the next morning.
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