the wrong tank

There's nothing like knowing a little about a subject for making you tetchy about the way it's covered in the media.  Al Murray, the comedian also known as The Pub Landlord, has written a whole book on the subject, Watching War Films With My Dad, and is unable to sit through A Bridge Too Far since watching it with his father, who finally exploded as a tank not built until after the war rumbled towards the bridge at Arnhem with a cry of It's the wrong bloody tank!  Me, I get exasperated with journalists' sloppy use of language when it comes to bees.

There was an eye catching headline on the Independent's website, Man dies after crashing car into bee-infested house.    It is a sad story, if slightly misleading headline, since it seems the poor chap had some sort of medical emergency at the wheel and crashed into the house, rather than running into the house and then being killed by bees.  Though the bees do not have a negligible role in the story, because they made life very difficult for the emergency services, and awkward for the neighbours, until zapped by foam.  It happened in Saginaw County, Michigan, which is why it hasn't had much press cover here, and the house was abandoned at the time of the accident.

Up to sixty thousand bees were living in the house, says the caption under the photograph of some bees at the top of the article (presumably a stock photo rather than the actual bees, but at least they are honey bees, and not wasps or hoverflies, so the Independent is doing better than papers often manage).  OK, I can see where they got the figure of sixty thousand from.  It is about the number of bees you'd expect in a full sized colony in the middle of summer.  So there was a colony of feral bees living in this abandoned house.

In paragraph two we read that the collision destroyed a hive, and it is at this point I start to get irritated, having (like Al Murray's Dad) controlled my earlier distaste at the use of the word 'infested', with its connotations of bedbugs or cockroaches.  A hive is a man-made box or container in which bees live.  A group of bees living together, queen, workers, maybe drones, is a colony. Colonies of wild bees may live in hollow trees, or caves, or abandoned houses, but they do not get their little saws and set squares out and build themselves hives.  It could be that there just happened to be a bee hive inside the house which had bees living in it, but unlikely, and almost certainly not what the writer meant.  More probably the bees were living inside the wall, between the external cladding and interior wall, which put them right in the front line of the accident.

People on the scene had rushed to help the man, but were blocked by the huge swarm of bees.  It's the wrong bloody tank again.  It was almost certainly not a swarm.  A swarm is a highly organised natural event in which the queen leaves the colony with most of the older, flying bees, to form a new colony somewhere else.  When newly emerged from their old home they are normally in a rather placid mood, laden with honey and having lost the instinctive urge to defend their former colony now they are headed to pastures new.  What you get if you suddenly and violently smash a colony apart is not a swarm, but a cloud or crowd or call it what you will of very angry bees who are intent on defending their home.  So yes, they were nasty at that moment, though they were probably not constitutionally nasty or the neighbours would have noted their presence and done something about them before.

I expect I get in just as much of a muddle writing about things I don't know much about.  Still, please remember, a hive is not a colony.  A colony is not a hive.  Your household is not the same as your house.