Swarm of bees makes home in local man’s car

Local beekeepers Mike and Eddie Farmer work to get a swarm of bees out of the bumper of this vehicle, parked in the Trademart Shopping Center parking lot Sunday.

It was around 6:00 p.m. Sunday night when Jesse Jones left work at JCPenney in Corbin to get the surprise of his life.
His supervisor warned him something was wrong with his car.

A random pedestrian handed him a cell phone. On the other line was a city police department dispatcher warning him not to go near his vehicle.

"I didn’t know if there was a bomb in it or what," Jones, 18, of Barbourville said with a smile. "I didn’t know what was going on."

It wasn’t a bomb.

Instead, a thick swarm of approximately 3,000 honeybees had moved into the front bumper of his early 2000s model Lincoln LX.

"The police, they couldn’t do anything," Jones said. "The fire department came after that. They were going to spray it with water or CO2 or whatever, but then they got a call from dispatch that said they were a protected species and they couldn’t hurt them or nothing like that."

Members of the fire department started calling every beekeeper they could find. Three showed up to help out, but the final group of keepers got the job done.

Mike Farmer, Eddie Farmer and Billy Farmer, local beekeepers, used a paintbrush, sugar water and a portable hive to coax three queen bees out of the bumper. Once the queens were in the hive, the rest of the drone bees soon followed suit.

Beekeepers on the scene say bees often migrate. Scout bees will look for a suitable location. Once discovered, the bees will gorge themselves on honey for sustenance and fly in a swarm to a new location. While swarming, they are typically docile and aren’t prone to stinging.

The beekeepers working outside JCPenney Sunday evening wore no protective gear and said they weren’t being stung.

"It was definitely one of the weirdest things to happen to me in awhile," Jones said from his home at around 9:15 p.m. Sunday night. "Once they got those queens out of there, the rest of them went too. I didn’t see any bees at all on my car when I got home."

"I guess it was just a freak of nature."