Sheriff’s office evidence team bugged by buzzing noise — then deputies find 8,000 bees
When members of a Florida sheriff’s office put an old cabinet outside to be thrown out, they didn’t expect to get some new neighbors — and definitely not loud ones.
Deputies put the cabinet near the evidence lot for the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office, according to a Sept. 29 Facebook post, and within a week the staff started to notice some buzzing.
Then they saw the bees.
A bee queen had decided the cabinet was the perfect place to start her new hive, and within a few days, more than 8,000 bees had moved in, the sheriff’s office said.
“This beehive-ior was really bugging the evidence team,” it said in the post.
Luckily for the sheriff’s office, two of its members knew a thing or two about bees.
“I went out there to work on a separate case and the evidence team notified me that, ‘Hey. Just be careful. There are some bees out there,’” Detective James Murray told WTVT. “So, I went over and checked it out and noticed they were honeybees and us being beekeepers … I showed them ‘Hey, I can get rid of these things for you guys if you want.”
The detective and Deputy William Batson are both licensed beekeepers, a hobby they enjoy outside of their work with the sheriff’s office, WTVT reported.
The two suited up and approached the hive, the sheriff’s office said.
They “carefully removed the hive and placed the swarm into the small, white box for relocation,” the sheriff’s office said.
Murray told WTVT they cut out the wax comb from the cabinet and carefully placed it into wooden frames, allowing the bees to follow the combs and build them back up.
Murray and Batson put the box in the back of a truck and drove them to their new home near Worden Farm, the sheriff’s office said.
There, the hive joined the existing bees already in the farm’s care.
“I just thought it was an opportunity to help the sheriff’s office, you know, obviously to remove the bees instead of having to pay an exterminator to come in,” Murray told WTVT. “And it just helps us out as well. It adds another hive to our apiary. All in all, it works out, you know, the bees get saved, and we are able to have another hive to care for and grow.”
Charlotte County is just north of Fort Myers, about 80 miles south of Tampa.
This story was originally published October 6, 2023 at 2:59 PM with the headline "Sheriff’s office evidence team bugged by buzzing noise — then deputies find 8,000 bees."
