Opera Philadelphia’s bee rescue becomes a honey of a cocktail

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.

When life gave Opera Philadelphia a swarm of bees, they made honey, which will be mixed into cocktails during its Festival O23, beginning Thursday.

Where do we bee-gin: On May 7, as the company prepared for the last performance of La bohème at the Academy of Music, its rental truck pulled up along Locust Street near Broad, awaiting the sets that would be loaded in after the final curtain.

Onlookers noticed that a swarm of bees had latched onto the top of the truck.

Opera company workers backstage began buzzing with ideas about what to do. “It was a half-hour before showtime,” said Shannon Eblen, the company’s content director. “We had two hours to remove those bees.”

Someone realized that Eric Schoefer, 60, a dancer/choreographer with strong ties to the local arts community, is a beekeeper. They tracked him down at a Philadelphia Beekeepers Guild conference in Chestnut Hill, fittingly. Schoefer made a beeline for the Academy with his equipment.

As Eblen posted video on social media — set, of course, to Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” — Schoefer went to work, clambering up on the truck and setting his bee box on the roof. He easily brushed the bees into the box.

Why did they swarm? “One of their goals in that time period in the spring is that they want to swarm as a superorganism and reproduce — making one, two, three new colonies in a year,” said Schoefer, who runs Cresheim Valley Honey in Mount Airy.

It’s unclear why this swarm landed on a truck rumbling through Center City — or during an opera by Puccini and not, say, Bizet.

“It’s usually a bush, though it can be odd things, like a mailbox or a stop sign in urban environments, and why they picked this truck going by, I just don’t know,” Schoefer said. “That’s the fascinating thing.” The week before, he said, he caught a swarm in a particular bush outside a house in Radnor that for some reason appears to be a magnet for bees.

Swarms are seldom a challenge for a beekeeper because the bees are in a “desperate mode to find a new home,” Schoefer said. “They just don’t have a whole lot of energy that they can spend on trying to defend themselves. They’ve got to find a new home. If it starts raining, they’re done.”

Inside the Academy, while Mimì desperately looked for Marcello during Act III, Opera Philadelphia workers cheered as the bees were corralled and secured in the box. Schoefer drove the bees to his place, where he dubbed them “the Opera Swarm.” The sets were loaded and the truck drove off, bee-free.

There’s another final act to this operetta. You might say it ain’t over till the fat lady stings.

The Opera Swarm produced honey, and Eblen got the idea to divert some of it to be mixed into a signature cocktail served to opera lovers this fall at Opera Philadelphia’s Festival O23. Tentatively named Opera Buzz, the cocktail also contains elderflower gin, tequila reposado, and lemonade. Starting Thursday, they will be served at the Academy of Music, Wilma Theater, and Suzanne Roberts Theater, where the company is staging operas during the festival.

“We love to find creative ways to connect opera to the city,” Eblen said.

In this case, the hive mind came through.