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Beekeeper shares incredible video of her rescuing an entire colony with her bare hands

Beekeeper shares incredible video of her rescuing an entire colony with her bare hands
@texasbeeworks/TikTok

If there were ever a person who could make people rethink their fear of bees, it would be Erika Thompson.

The professional beekeeper and founder of Texas Bee Works has created an enormous social media following with her oddly soothing videos of bee infestation removals. Thompson only wears protective equipment when she needs to, but she is able to determine when it's not necessary. Watching someone scoop up and move handfuls of bees with her bare hands is terrifying, and yet somehow not.

Thompson's most recent video shows her moving a colony of bees from the underside of an umbrella into a hive. She said that when bees collect in swarms like this, they are looking for a new place to live. Under these circumstances, because they don't have any resources to defend, they are usually very docile.

As she explains in the video, she always looks for the queen bee as she moves the worker bees to their new home, but this time, she didn't find one—a rare queenless colony. She just happened to have a queen bee in a box with her, which she placed on the hive. She explained that the bees will either reject the queen, in which case they will try to kill her, or they will accept her by eating through the candy that serves as a barrier on the end of the box to release her.

No pressure, queenie.

As the bees in the hive start accepting the queen, they begin to send signals to the bees that are still on the umbrella to come on down and move in. At that point, all Thompson had to do was wait until most of them got the message and moved—about 15 minutes.

@texasbeeworks

#bees #nature #summer #tiktok #fyp


Incredible creatures. Incredible beekeeper.

Thompson's videos regularly receive millions of views, and it's not hard to see why. Not only is she doing good work to save bees and help people, but her calm voice and fearless handling of the buggers is almost meditative. Who knew that beekeeping could be therapeutic?

See more videos from Erika Thompson on TikTok and on Instagram.

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