Erika Thompson, the founder of Texas Beeworks, recently came across a colony of bees living a toilet tank. Watch this video to see how she expertly transferred the bees to a wooden hive, and how she found the queen and used her as a lure to encourage the remaining stray bees to walk down a ramp from the toilet tank to the hive. And she did this without wearing a beekeepers outfit!
Texas Monthly recently profiled Thompson. From the article:
In her videos, Thompson moves slowly and purposefully, and she looks calm and content. In a voice-over, she narrates the process. Before she turned to beekeeping full-time last year, Thompson was a communications director, and while a background in communications does not necessarily guarantee that one is a good communicator, Thompson is: her voice has the uncondescending warmth of a kindergarten teacher's.
In the comments below the video from August, viewers lost their minds, many of them balking over Thompson's lack of gear. Unless she notices signs of aggression from the bees she's inspecting, Thompson rarely wears a suit when she does her bee work: she does get stung occasionally, but she doesn't mind. "How is she not scared[?] when I see a bee [I] pass out for a year," one commenter wrote. "I just really love bees!" Thompson replied.
