Thursday, August 23, 2012

Confusing News Articles report 3,000,000 Bees Removed from Driveway in Queens

There's a news article going around today about 45 honeybee hives in one man's driveway having to be removed. None of them seem to seem to say clearly enough as to why, but BEES!!!
 
New York Post
Yahoo
CBS New York

I gather that he's selling his house, maybe? And the real estate agent freaked out, I think? And this man helped with the removal of his hives... where he might get fined an outrageous amount of money. 

The Tone of the Article
Ewww these bees are awful! OMG there's 45 hives being kept like Dogs! Neighbors complained about the constant buzzing and being attacked by "swarms" of bees. 

But...

This man thought of them like his faithful companions. Imagine 45 dogs living in a 20' by 20' area. For just pennies a day you too can donate to make sure this man's bee yard doesn't look like a shanty town in Rwanda.  

The articles read to touch on both stories here and I don't understand. The Dog analogy does not work for either case. Maybe these people should visit a bee yard sometime. I mean they might be spaced out a bit more than 20' by 20' but we might as well compare humans on a farm vs. in the city. 

How Many Hives?
45? Where? I'm looking at the pictures and I count and with estimating I count about 23. Some of those are nucs too, that is they're 5 frame boxes that make up the whole hive, instead of the traditional 10 frame boxes which one can continue to put boxes on top of. Maybe they just counted the boxes? 

The bottom line is the headline is all you needed to read with any of these articles.