‘The bee saga’: Inside a SC senator’s battle to rid his Beaufort law office of bees
While all the buzz lately has been about coronavirus, Beaufort’s state senator is dealing with a different buzz.
A colony of honey bees ignored social distancing guidelines and invaded S.C. Sen. Tom Davis’ law office in late March. He tried to shoo them away. They refused to leave. He called a bee expert, an apiarist, who tried to entice the bees away with a new queen.
Just when he thought he’d rid the building of most of the buzz, wayward bees flew into his office at Harvey & Battey and set up camp in his overhead light.
Davis began tweeting regularly about his bee saga, and followers joined in, expressing delight at the senator’s strange predicament.
“Went for a quick surveil of the bee situation; not good. Many have adopted the overhead light in my office as a surrogate hive; don’t understand the appeal,” Davis tweeted on Saturday. “Started to go inside to open the window, but quickly reconsidered. Hope apiarist makes weekend calls; I’m in over my head.”
“Wait a while,” twitter user @OldOkieKid tweeted at the senator. “You will have a sweet office.”
Still, this couldn’t continue. Davis had serious work to do, and he couldn’t hand his office over to the bees for their shelter-in-place haven.
“I like honey bees,” he said. “I appreciate what they do for our ecosystem, but at the same time, they were driving me crazy.”
Bees are critical critters in the ecosystem. Their pollination supports the growth of trees, flowers and major food sources. They’ve endured monumental degradation to their environment. Exterminating them wasn’t an option for Davis.
“I learned a lot about them and a lot about their allegiance to the queen,” he said. “There’s a whole new world out there that I had a glimpse into.”
After the local beekeeper humanely “vacuumed up” and relocated most of the winged insects, Davis thought his bee problem was over.
It wasn’t.
When Davis walked into his office this past Saturday, hundreds of new bees were swarming and buzzing around. They had ventured inside. “They caused a distraction, but they never were aggressive.”
He gritted his teeth, dashed across his office and flung his window open, allowing the bees to fly out.
“The next day, 90 percent had taken advantage of flying outdoors,” he said. “I just kind of let them make their way out of there. It’s done now. There are still a few bees that will fly in, but the masses aren’t there anymore.”
Three weeks after they arrived, the bees have been safely relocated to “the woods,” Davis said, although he’s not sure where. They have a new hive in which to shelter, and Davis is back in his office, a safe distance from insects and, he hopes, the coronavirus.
