PITTSBURGH — Crews setting up for the Morgan Wallen concerts at Acrisure Stadium were shocked when they found a swarm of honeybees on Tuesday!
It was a small business that stepped in to help. Al Fine of Fine Family Apiary took his talents from Monongahela up to Acrisure Stadium.
“My daughter, Alyssa Fine, got a call, and she texted me, and said ‘hey, there’s a bee swarm at Acrisure, do you want to go down and get it?’” Fine said. “And I said ‘yeah, might as well.’”
The honeybees were swarming around some scaffolding going up for the concerts.
“This is a pretty good size swarm,” Fine said. “I think around 4-5 pounds, which is about 12,000-15,000 bees.”
Fine says he used a mixture of sugar water, lemon grass and spearmint oils. After about an hour and a half, he says around 95% of the swarm went into a box.
“We saved the show,” Fine joked. “No, no, I’m just kidding. No, actually, we saved the bees because if you couldn’t get somebody to take them, someone would have had to opt to kill the bees, and we don’t want to do that.”
Fine relocated the bees to Monongahela. It’s there that he hopes they’ll produce lots and lots of honey and do what they do best.
“A third of every bite you take is probably directly pollinated by honeybees,” Fine said. “All the good stuff. The watermelons. The apples. The strawberries. The berries and stuff like that. We’d have a pretty bland diet if we didn’t have honeybees.”
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