PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — For some, it was a menacing sight.

Hundreds of bees were spotted swarming outside of The Pennsylvanian, a downtown apartment complex.

They surrounded a bench and hid inside trees. People steered clear of the area, but when beekeeper Jim Fitzroy arrived on scene, he became concerned.

“These bees, there’s something wrong, I’m not sure if they got into pesticides or whatever, but I’m going to do the best I can do with it.”

Fitzroy says instead of following the sugar water into the box, many of the honey bees remained grounded.

“I’ll let them go for a couple days in a hospital thing and then the live ones, I’ll combine them with another colony,” Fitzroy said.

This isn’t the first time this has happened in the city this year. Fitzroy says it happened twice before.

“There was one down at the college – Point Park – there was one across the street from the courthouse in the parking lot,” he said.

So why is this happening?

“It was a mild winter and a lot of the bees wintered successfully and this is the way bees expand their colony. Once they get crowded in their hives, the old queen leaves with half the bees and starts a new colony and what they do is they come here and hang out and they send out scout bees to look for a new home and then when they find a new home, they all leave together.”

Fitzroy says he doesn’t know what went wrong for the bees today, but he says they clearly ran into a problem.

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