Downtown Palmyra was a-buzz with bees Thursday

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The buzz around downtown last week was the bees were being difficult about moving on.

A unique site greeted visitors to downtown Palmyra last Thursday afternoon as two beekeepers, Skylar Anderson and Katherine Westhoff, of Buzzed Aster Apiary, attempted to remove a swarm of bees from the overhang in front of Hall’s Hall.

Later, thanks to Lee Hall, the bees were safely removed

According to Anderson, she received a call from her bee mentor, Tom Stark of Maywood, Mo. about a swarm of bees that needed removed because of them being in a public location.

At the time Anderson got her call, several people had posted on Facebook asking for assistance.

“We were excited and got all of our supplies ready to go,” said Anderson. “On our way, we got notification that the swarm had moved off. We were bummed, but its nothing unusual for swarms to move on quickly.

About two hours later, Anderson said the pair got a call from another beekeeper, who was unable to find any help after contacting numerous other beekeepers in the area.

At that point, the bees were in the overhang at Hall’s Hall, the former Ben Franklin building in downtown Palmyra.

“We arrived and worked on the removal for approximately four hours with no luck in finding the queen,” said Anderson,

noting the pair even tried pouring water in the guttering. 

The pair asked for and received assistance from Andrew and Carrie Booth from New London, but were still unable to locate the queen.

“The landowner’s son (Lee Hall) came with a hive box, and we gladly handed the job over to him to finish,” Anderson said.

According to Anderson, this was the first swarm the duo had attempted to extract, although they do have experience extracting bee hives.

“Usually we remove established hives that are normally found in dead trees,” she said, noting they would have stayed to assist with the final removal of the bees, but had families to return home to and ran out of time to help.

“It was a day full of learning and directing sidewalk traffic,” she added. “But I must note how caring and accommodating local businesses were while we were there.”

According to Patty Hall, her son, who has had bees for several years and has his own equipment, positioned one of his hive boxes in the nearby flowerpot and waited for the bees to locate into the box.

“He had some honey in the hive, and they pretty quickly began moving into the box,” Hall said, noting Lee removed the bees in the hive about 8:30 or 9 p.m. Thursday evening.