City looks to relocate bees making home in downtown traffic light

Bees swarm downtown traffic light. (Photo Credit: Sarah Chew, CityNews)[/caption]

Bees swarm downtown traffic light. (Photo Credit: Sarah Chew, CityNews)[/caption]How do you get rid of a bee swarm downtown? Tell them to buzz off? It would be nice if it were that easy, but making bees move might be harder than the City thinks.

A swarm of honeybees on an LRT signal light outside of City Centre mall in downtown Edmonton caused alarm Tuesday and Wednesday – but a local beekeeper is on it.

“So my goal is to get as much of the swarm in the box as I can,” says Darrell Sopel. The beekper says he wanted to capture the queen bee, “and if I get enough of that pheromone scent inside the box, then the swarm will move into the box.”

Sopel says the swarm was trying to make the LRT signal light their new home this summer, as warmer weather brings peak bee reproduction conditions. “Up until the day that the new queens hatch,” he told CityNews, “The old queen will leave with 60-80 per cent of the workers, and they go off and they start a new hive, and that’s what a swarm is.”

Sopel wondered if the queen bee might be inside the light post – which means the pheromone-sprayed box might not be enough to draw her out. “We’ve already planned the next step to take the light post off if attaching the box to it doesn’t work.”

Office worker Ken Powell spotted a bee swarm looking to create a hive. “Yesterday, I come outside for a while. And the bees up there were just swarming all over the street,” Powell told CityNews. “There were people running indoors and covering their heads. It was like the apocalypse I guess.”

Does all those bees buzzing around downtown put you at risk of being stung? Sopel says no. “Most honey bees don’t care anything about us. They want to get their nectar, they want to do their thing, as long as you’re not actively approaching the swarm or agitating the swarm, or you’re not directly going into a beehive, they don’t care.”