Bees on a wall in Coram Street [Eccy de Jonge]

IT started out as just another committee meeting day for the SOAS Beekeeping Society.

But on Tuesday the group of students found themselves scrambled out on a red alert to a swarm in Coram Street, Bloomsbury.

A breakaway blizzard of the black and yellow buzzers had settled on a block flats following a suspected hive revolt at the nearby Institute of Education.

Experts said a hive would have got too full with the emergence of a second queen leading to the tribal split and triggering a series of “scouts” flying out to find a new home.

The bee scouts had discovered a small hole in the wall in Coram Street, but thousands clumped together on the outside.

Committee president Cherry Butler-Boden, who helped coax the bees down from the wall in a cardboard box, said: “Basically the queen is like the head of the hive and she fertilises all the bees and gives birth to them, laying all the eggs. Her pheromones control the whole hive.

“And queens can even have their own personalities. If you have an angry queen, all the hive will be like an angry hive and sting all the people and stuff. I think this queen is very calm and a lovely queen, there has only been one sting today.”

Juliet Cestar, Eccy de Jonge, Gabriel Mullins, Alexander Nicholas and Cherry Butler-Boden

The society is in the process of returning beehives to SOAS after the last colony had to be moved to Hackney City Farm during the Covid lockdown and could not be looked after.

Gabriel Mullins, another member of the committee, said: “There is actually already a really high concentration of honey bees in central London. So when we were looking at starting this up we had to take into account what was the availability of pollen and how will our bees impact the eco system? We want to draw bees from somewhere else, and make it really low impact, and insulate our hive. But it’s quite a contentious issue.”

SOAS Beekeeping Society wellbeing officer Alexander Nicholas said: “It was funny because we were on our way to having our committee meeting today. These two were on the way to that, and they found the swarm. We basically axed all our plans. What are the chances, right?”

The bees were spotted by Eccy de Jonge who lives in the block in Coram Street.

“It was extraordinary, people were walking straight through literally a cloud of bees,” she said. “I had to shut my window quickly.”

The council was called but legislation ensures that bee swarms have to be managed by specialists.

Juliet Cestar, a registered expert from Notting Hill who helped contain the swarm, said: “My bees died over the winter and I have an empty hive. So I’m going to take these bees and tonight, when it’s getting dark and they calm down, I’ll put them in.” She said she was going to “buy” the bees from the students in a donation to the SOAS hive.

If you want to donate to the new SOAS bee hive fund the students have set up a link below:

https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/SOASBeekeepingSociety?utm_term=wJ8W7w9r6