Bees at Kauffman Stadium

Baseball and bees have often gone together, as in the Cubs-Mariners and Rockies-Padres games disrupted by swarms this March. The latest incident happened Sunday, where thousands of bees invaded the upper deck of the Kansas City Royals’ Kauffman Stadium ahead of their game with the Cleveland Indians, prompting quite a funny response from the Indians’ Twitter account:

As this Kansas City Star video shows, though, the Royals’ ground crew was more than up to the challenge of dealing with the bees. Jeff Diekmann, who’s on that crew, is a professional beekeeper, and he was able to remove the swarm even without protective equipment:

As the Star‘s Rustin Dodd noted, Royals’ manager Ned Yost previously helped humanely remove a group of bees during a March 2016 spring training game, and said at that time that it was vital to preserve bees given their environmental impact:

“It’s just important for the environment,” said Yost, who spends offseasons at his farm in rural Georgia. “I saw a study a couple years ago where the honey bee was declining and they cannot figure out why. And I started looking at it and studying it, the importance of what they do, in terms of pollination with all the crops. Especially the fruit trees and stuff like that. They’re vital to the environment.

“To just arbitrarily kill a bunch of bees makes zero sense to me. I’m not like that with a lot of stuff, right. But I’m a conservationist. I love conservation. I love the aspect of wildlife, fish, I love that stuff.

It’s certainly good that they didn’t have to kill these bees. Hopefully the bees won’t return to Kaufmann any time soon, though. If we’ve learned anything from The Simpsons, bees and professional sporting events aren’t a great mix.

[For The Win]

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.