Interview with the “BBQ Beehive Bomber”
There is a set of photos spreading across the Internet showing the result of one man’s quest to remove a hive from his barbecue. Australian Josh Horton used an insecticide bomb to remove what he thought was a small hive from his covered barbecue. When the smoke cleared though, he discovered a honeybee hive that could have housed over 1,000 bees! The story has been picked up by national news agencies across Australia and has been discussed on message boards and blogs around the world. I too was amazed by the photos and wanted to know more, so I tracked down Josh, who has been nicknamed the “Barbecue Beehive Bomber,” and asked him a few questions via e-mail:
Me: Can you tell us what lead to finding the hive?
Josh: The cover was on the bbq, had only been there for about 2 months, if that. I saw a few bees around the base of the left side of the cover. You would only see maybe 4 bees max at a time – no buzzing, no noise at all.
As there were only a few, I used the rake to whack the side of the cover hoping to dislodge or disturb the nest, thus they will move away on their own. (The reason why on the picture of bbq covered there was a rake on the ground is because I would whack it, drop it, and run like the clappers). As the missus is very allergic to bees, and I just don’t want to get stung, I wanted to get rid of them before removing the cover.
The second attempt was to unload a can of nest kill insect spray at the base but, as you can image, it did bugger all. I knew I needed to spray something up the cover. Now I needed to find a way to hold a spray can in place pointing up and hold the nozzle down at the same time. As I knew those home-cockroach bombs did exactly that, I looked for a similar one designed for all insects, but no luck. Those bombs are designed for a full large room in a house so it would be overkill in the cover… perfect… Now as I didn’t want to get stung, I needed a way to put the bomb under the cover. The rake laying there on the ground (from where I dropped it and bolted) gave me a perfect idea. With tape handy, I took two seconds to tape the two together, thus the deployment weapon.
I put the first bomb under and the left side but as I couldn’t quite get it under. It would spray but most wouldn’t get under the cover. The 2nd time I went around the right side in the garden. I could get right up close without worrying about the bees. The 2nd time it worked perfectly… the idea was to either kill the bees or at least gas them and force them to leave.
The sound that came was incredible. I never heard anything like that before. From 5m away, it was still quite loud. The first indication of how many bees were there was the pile under the cover that grew very fast.
Me: After you discovered the hive, what did you do? Did you remove them from your BBQ?
Josh: I had no idea the hive was there ’til I took the cover off.. I honestly expected maybe 20 and a tiny little hive. I pulled half the cover off and noticed a waxy something on the hot plate and on the left side shelf. I thought to myself, “Na.. that can’t be what I think it is…” There is one picture I believe of the cover half removed to see the tip of the hive. That’s when I saw the extent of the hive. By this point, all the bees were dead so it was too late to save them or call someone in. Remember, I was still in shock at the hive.
Me: How long did it take to clean up the destruction? What did you do with the remains of the hive?
Josh: I blew the bees behind the fence and into the garden. I unbolted that side shelf to get a better look at the hive and keep it to show my mates when they came over on the weekend. The idea was to coat it in fiberglass resin (i do a lot of hobby fiberglass on my cars and such), but after a week and plenty of photos, everyone had seen it. The ants were starting to be attracted to the small amount of honey in it, so I destroyed it and buried it. Two days later, it came out on the funny forward emails then on news.com.au. Now I wish I kept it.
Me: How do you feel about destroying so many bees? Do you wish you had done it differently?
Josh: If I had known the hive was there, I would have got someone in to remove the queen properly.
All images copyright Josh Horton. Used with permission.
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andrew