CHASE AFTER WHAT’S BEEN TAKEN
June 20, 2018
One summer afternoon, a call came into the fire station in the city of S.
C ALLER : Right now, there are bees swarming, a huge swarm—it’s pure chaos.
Firefighters were quickly dispatched to the scene, where they found twenty-three thousand bees swarming over the road and darkening the sky.
A beekeeper who happened to be passing through gave the hapless firefighters a helping hand.
F IREFIGHTER : The most amazing thing was how the beekeeper rounded up all those bees into a hive. He was like—what’s it called? From that old children’s book. The guy who played the flute and led a horde of mice away from—was it Hamong? Hamel? Anyway, just like that guy with the flute, he led all those bees away.
B EEKEEPER : Ah, it’s not like I used some sort of magic on them. Their queen had died, so they were stranded on that road. I didn’t know where they came from, but maybe they were trying to find a new hive ... In any case, they gather when they catch the scent of a queen bee. So I put a dead queen inside a hive and brought that with me, and the bees followed the scent. I think it took about an hour for them all to be rounded up.
The only victims were a handful of bees that perished in the early stages of these suppression tactics, and no people were hurt. May the queen bee rest in peace.