A Toronto man threw caution to the wind when he swooped in, using nothing more his bare hands and a cardboard box, to save a swarm of bees that appeared to have lost their queen.
Late last week, Nima Alizadeh was surfing the Facebook page of the Bunz Trading Zone, a popular online bartering group in Toronto. He spotted a photo of a bee swarm that had congregated at the base of a midtown fire hydrant and realized he lived not too far away.
So Alizadeh biked over and began collecting the bees in a cardboard box using his bare hands -- not fearing the bees at all.
“I wasn’t afraid of getting stung or anything, and I find that bees are pretty important,” Alizadeh told CTV News Channel Monday.
“It wasn’t anything that any other Bunz member wouldn’t have done. So I felt like I should do it.”
Alizadeh admits he spent a “strenuous” hour trying to convince the bees to get into the box.
“I had to keep throwing them into the box, throwing them into the box,” he says. “After about 20 or so got in there, they finally started to stay in the box and not fly or crawl out.”
At one point, a security guard lent him a pair of gloves, which he realized after he finally took them off, had probably been a good idea.
“I found a few stingers in the gloves, so a few of them must have stung the gloves,” he said.
Once they were all loaded into the box, Alizadeh brought them home, buckled the box into the passenger seat of his car, and drove them across the city to someone who knows a beekeeper.
He says the beekeeper has told him the plan is to introduce the bees to three different colonies and see if they integrate.
“Hopefully, they either join another colony or make their own,” he said, noting that the beekeeper happily accepted the new arrivals.
Alizadeh doesn’t know if the bees will make it, but he’s glad he could do his part to help them.
“I know bees are struggling as a species right now and it seemed like something that could help.”
