‘Thank you bee guy’: How the Diamondbacks handled swarm at Chase Field

Five minutes before game time at Chase Field on Tuesday night, Mike Rock, the Arizona Diamondbacks' vice president of ballpark operations, received a worried phone call.

Bees had begun to congregate at the top of the 30-foot netting behind home plate. Rock wanted to know how many.

“Hundreds,” Kat McDonald, the Diamondbacks’ senior manager of events told him. “No, wait, thousands.”

“I knew,” Rock said later, “we had a problem then.”

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What transpired was a night unlike any other in Diamondbacks history, one featuring an exterminator, clad in a beekeeper’s mask, being raised 30 feet in the air on a scissor lift in front of a captivated crowd of 28,667.

Eventually, the bees were taken away and the game between the Diamondbacks and Los Angeles Dodgers got underway. But not until a little drama had unfolded first.

McDonald was on the field with the group that performed the national anthem when she noticed the bees had formed a colony atop the backstop, on a spot where a cable held the netting in place. She quickly called Rock, who hurried down to talk over the situation with the umpire crew.

The concern was uniform: What would happen if a foul ball rattled the netting and disturbed the bees?

“It would have happened,” Rock said. “In that position, the net would have been hit hard enough and it would have stirred the whole thing and they could have dropped down into the people below.”

Rock said umpire Adrian Johnson, the crew chief, determined they could not play with the bees there due to the risk it posed to players.

That’s when Rock called Blue Sky Pest Control, a company the Diamondbacks often use, to see how quickly they could get someone to the ballpark. The answer wasn’t what anyone wanted to hear.

Blue Sky branch manager Matt Hilton was at his son’s T-ball game in Surprise. He said he would need 45 minutes to get there. Rock tried calling another company, but their exterminator was just as far away.

Rock said there was talk of canceling the game. Instead, they waited for Hilton, who eventually arrived around 7:50 p.m., pulling up to the loading dock east of the ballpark, where a golf cart was waiting to ferry him onto the field.

The Chase Field crowd greeted his arrival with aplomb. He climbed aboard the lift, slowly ascended to the top, sprayed the bees with a solution, then vacuumed them up with what looked like a Shop-Vac. The entire process took less than 10 minutes — and was shown in real-time on the video board.

“It was a little nerve-wracking, I’m not going to lie,” said Hilton, adding that the bees would be released offsite. “Lot of pressure to get this game going. But I was happy to come and take care of it.”

On his way down, Hilton pumped his fist to celebrate while the video board paid tribute with a message. It read, “Thank you bee guy.”

“It was nice to see him come in and pump his arm like that,” Rock said. “He kind of filled in a little entertainment.”

Hilton’s night wasn’t over: A half hour later, he was back on the field to throw out the ceremonial first pitch.

Finally, after a one-hour, 55-minute delay, the game began at 8:35 p.m.

Bees often interrupt baseball games during spring training. But it was at least the second time they have played a role at Chase Field. During a game in 2014, a game against the San Francisco Giants was disrupted by bees in center field.

“We know that this was really important to get these games going and so when we hear that there's bee issues out at Diamondbacks stadium we tried to get at it right away,” Hilton said. “We were happy to deploy really quickly and come get this game going.”

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: A Phoenix-area bee expert became MVP of Diamondbacks-Dodgers game