This is my first January with a bee hive in the backyard. Weirdly warm weather has me (and the bees) reminded that spring is coming soon so I have become bee obsessed, reading everything and watching YouTube videos. My natural inclination to time travel kicks in fairly often though, and this article came to light. It was fun. I hope you enjoy it as well!
Today you can still find some of the streets and buildings that the bees saw. This Google Map image capture is at the crossing of Wellington and Strand...the Gaiety Theater location was just off camera to the right I think. I had a good time looking for the office of the Army and Navy Gazette where the bees gathered. However, no joy :-(
A SWARM OF BEES IN THE STRAND.
A good deal of amusement was caused among the people who chanced to be near the corner of Upper Wellington-street, Strand, on the Tuesday afternoon of last week, by the unexpected visitation of a swarm of bees in that central part of London.
The Field office is close by there, and it was at first supposed they might have arrived from the country as a deputation to inform the editor of some matter in the department of rural natural history. But Mr. W. B. Tegetmeier had not been prepared to receive them, and was quietly sitting and writing in his editorial study, when a brother naturalist came in to tell him that the bees were assembled just round the corner.
He went out and found them besieging the stage door of the Gaiety Theatre, and greatly alarming some of the lady members of Mr. Hollingshead's theatrical company, who wanted to go in for a rehearsal at that hour. The stage manager, Mr. R. Soutar, was at the door in much consternation, and begged Mr. Tegetmeier, by all his science and skill in the way of insects and other winged creatures, to disperse the buzzing mob as quickly as he could.
Mr. Tegetmeier at once sent for a ladder, as the bees had swarmed high up the front of the Army and Navy Gazette office; then, having armed himself with a short broom, and with a cylindrical cheese-box and a dish-cloth from the Restaurant, he boldly ascended, and cleverly, with one sweep, brushed all the insects into the box, clapped the cloth over them, and had then, fast prisoners, to the admiration of all spectators in the street below.
He then placed a hive, with the queen bee, in the balcony, and set the box there beside it, allowing the whole swarm to pass into the hive and rally round their queen; “which they did,” he says in the Field, “as loyally as if they had been Britons, and she had been Queen Victoria.”
They are now doing well in a frame hive, and he hopes the queen bee will be the parent of many stocks, to be called “the Strand bees". In explanation of this odd little incident of London life, it is stated that Mr. Neighbour, a hive manufacturer, in Holborn, had that morning got from the country several swarms of bees, which he had ordered to be sent to him, to stock some hives for his customers; and one swarm had made its escape and flown as far as the Strand.
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