WATCH: Bee Friends Farms relocates tens of thousands of bees from Florida Theatre

If you heard some buzz about some unexpected tenants at the Florida Theatre, you weren’t alone.

Paul Sifton and his business, Bee Friends Farms, removed about 20,000 bees along with 70 pounds of honeycomb from the building next to the theater recently.

Numa Saisselin, Florida Theatre president, said the bees had been there for years and made their home by getting in through a little crack right by the stage door. A few weeks ago, however, more bees suddenly appeared and began getting more aggressive and stinging employees.

“Our crew chief told me about the situation,” Saisselin said, “and I said ‘I know who to call.’”

Sifton, a supporter of the theater, helped plan how they would open a hole in the facade next door without anyone getting hurt or stung, and the building’s owner worked with Saisselin to split the cost of the bee relocation.

“There were a lot more bees than we expected,” Saisselin said. “Fortunately, everything has gone very well. This is definitely a first for me.”

Sifton said it was possible that as many as 40,000 bees were calling the theater home since the crew found about 20,000 during the day, which is when bees typically leave the hive to forage and pollinate.

Sifton said he wasn’t sure what caused the bees to become aggressive suddenly.

“Bees are not completely understood,” he said. “They have a lot of uniqueness to them that we think we understand but don’t totally understand. It could be that someone had a perfume they didn’t like or had something sweet with them, like a soda or something like that, or it could be that they just felt like they were threatened, especially at night when it’s their rest time.”

Bee Friends Farms, which has a retail shop on Edgewood Avenue in Murray Hill, probably gets three calls a week to relocate bees, Sifton said. Typically, Michael Leach, bee master and Sifton’s business partner, removes the bees, but this is the farm’s busiest time of year so Josh Cox volunteered to do it instead.

“He works hard at trying to save all of the bees that he can,” Sifton said.

The most important part, he said, was getting the queen bee out to encourage the others to move.

“It’s very important when extracting them, and it’s not always very obvious,” he said. “We weren’t sure that we’d gotten it until probably three-quarters of the way through.”

Exhaust from a specialized vacuum system used to trap the bees without hurting them was blowing on Cox’s legs, Sifton said, and they assumed they captured the queen when the bees started covering his legs, likely because they smelled the queen’s scent.

Without the queen in the hive, the bees that weren’t home for the removal process will likely come back and eat whatever honey the crew wasn’t able to remove before moving on to find new hives, Sifton said.

“You want them to clean it up so it doesn’t attract other insects,” he added.

The extraction took about four and a half hours in total.

Sifton said Cox told him the bees have “taken to their new home and seem to be very happy and foraging again in the daytime.”

The Florida Theatre plans to auction off some of the honey removed in this process at their Vegas-themed gala on May 18.

“I think the extraction went really well, and now the bees have a happy new home,” Sifton said.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: About 20,000 bees make big buzz at Florida Theatre, local bees-ness helps out