Be-easy does it! Motorist gets a fright after returning to his car to find swarm of 20,000 BEES stuck to door
- SSE worker found squirming insects making themselves at home on his car door
- Was forced to call in bee farmer to remove the swarm in Aberdeen yesterday
- It's swarm season, which sees bees reproduce and find new places to build hives
A motorist was locked out of his own car when a swarm of 20,000 bees stuck themselves to his door.
The Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) worker got a fright when he returned to his vehicle in Aberdeen city centre yesterday afternoon.
He was on his way to do a metre reading when he found the insects making themselves at home on his driver's seat door.
While most would've panicked, the motorist phoned bee farmer Brian Gal, who came to the rescue.
Mr Gal, 40, attended the scene and was filmed removing the squirming swarm with his hands.
A motorist was locked out of his own car when a swarm of 20,000 bees stuck themselves to his door
Bee farmer Brian Gal manged to get rid of the insects by identifying the queen bee and removing her - which prompted the worker bees to follow
In order to get rid of the swarm, the bee farmer had to locate the queen and remove her so the worker bees would follow.
Mr Gal placed a letter inside the seam of the car door to prevent the queen from hiding, which he joked was like a 'live version of Where's Wally'
Mr Gal posted the video to Facebook yesterday writing: 'The SSE car with more shock than electric. That's how we get a swarm of bees to go where I want them to.
'Find the queen and cage her with some workers. Place the cage where you want them to go. Wait till they all march into the box. Job done.'
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'Any bees that are left will head back home to the hive they come from. These bees will be used for pollination at Castleton Farm Shop & Cafe next year once their into a full size hive.'
The insects are now living on Castleton Farm in Fordoun, Aberdeenshire, where they will be able to thrive in a more appropriate location.
Speaking today Mr Gal explained incidents like this are becoming more common.
He said: 'Yesterday I was doing swarm management with my own bees when I got a call from the driver, its right in the middle of swarm season now.
Once he found the queen he lured her away and waited with a bucket for the worker bees to follow
Mr Gal explained that because the bees are in 'swarm mode' they are unlikely to attack and are primarily looking to reproduce and build a hive somewhere else. Pictured: The bees follow the queen into a bucket
'In their original hives the queen lays about 2,000 eggs a day and they obviously start running out of room, so about five or six days before they're ready to hatch the queen leaves the hive with about 20,000 of her workers.
'This time she just happened to land on the SSE car. Normally they would land in a bush or a tree but with more people keeping bees in the city it is more common for them to land on cars or in other weird places.
'We've had them land on motorbikes before and also in a postbox once.
'Because the van was completely secure there weren't any bees inside but the queen likes to hide so she was inside the seal of the doorframe, that's why I had the letter in the video and you can see me trying to encourage them out of the cracks.
'Identifying the queen is like a live version of Where's Wally but she has a slightly bigger thorax and a slightly longer abdomen so she can reverse into the hives to lay eggs.
'Because they're in swarm mode, not attack mode you can actually scoop them up with your hand, once you get the queen and a couple of workers then the rest will follow her pheromones so it only took about 20 minutes to get them into the bucket.
It comes after mother-of-two Katherine Stevens, from Lincoln, found a swam of bees on the window of her car at an Esso garage.
Katherine Stevens, from Lincoln, found a swam of bees congealed into a ball on the window sill of her car
Video and photos from the scene showed bees flying around the open window of the car before congealing into a ball on the window sill.
Ms Stevens, from Lincoln, said it was an 'amazing experience' to see the bees, but one she hadn't been expecting.
'My partner is a mechanic and had parked it in the car park while he worked in a nearby garage,' she said. 'It's the first day of the year he's decided to leave the window down while he works.
She said her partner looked out of the garage to see a black cloud around the car, which turned out to be hundreds of bees.
'It seems they've left the hive because there's too many of them,' she said. 'The queen decided to have a rest on the car with all the others around her.'
Ms Stevens said it was an 'amazing experience' to witness the bees, but one she hadn't been expecting
The swarm showed no signs of leaving, so Katherine was forced to call a bee keeper to deal with the writhing ball.
'The bee keeper was 30 minutes away. He had a cardboard box and he scooped a big bunch, as much as possible, into the box. He had to make sure the queen was in the there.
'He took a bottle of water and was banging around and spraying water, making them think it was a thunderstorm so they would swarm around the queen and protect her.
'The bee keeper said there could have been something in our air freshener to attract them, but it's not particularly strong and we didn't have any sweets in the car.
'They were still gathering back to the car, he collected as many as he could. However, some of them were left in the car so we had to de-bee the car by waiting for them to go away or die. We just had to moved away from the car and wait for it to happen, which took a couple of hours.
'My three year old was very excited by it.'
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