Bee hysteria!

I stumbled across this headline in my rss feeds of news stories about honeybees.
Woman trapped by garden bee swarm

Of course with a headline like that I had to read it. Turns out a woman in the UK had a swam of bees settle into her garden tree. She says she closed all her window and doors to keep the bees out but no where does she indicate being "trapped". In fact she even has close up pictures of the swarm in her tree, so obviously she was not trapped anywhere. The article also quotes the woman as saying that a neighbor had just gotten a bee hive and maybe that is where they swarmed from.

But of course making it sound like the evil bees trapped this lady I'm sure made more people read.

Bees (and many other insects for that matter) really get a bad rap sometimes. While this article does not explicitly say anything bad about them, it also does nothing to share the good bees do or dispel the myth of how dangerous they are. I've never seen an actual swarm in person, but everything I've read indicates that they are actually very docile during this process. All they want to do is protect the queen and find a new home. http://www.beecare.com/indexDynFrames.htm?http://www.beecare.com/Bees/Swarms.htm&1

Recently in the press most articles I've read are "bee positive" and not fear invoking like this one. The whole colony collapse issue has brought honeybees more front and center with people seeing how important they are. As amateur bee keepers we do all we can to help promote bees and spread the message about how important and friendly they really are. We should all keep eyes on sensational headlines and do what we can to set stories about bees straight.