PHOENIX —
About 10 minutes before first pitch at Chase Field on Tuesday night, the ballpark’s vice president of operations, Mike Rock, received a call from a colleague.
The wrong kind of buzz had overtaken the stadium.
“We have bees landing on the net right behind home plate.”
“How many?” he asked.
“Hundreds. No wait, thousands!”
Rock immediately jumped into action.
“I knew we had a problem,” he said.
Indeed, with a swarm of bees wrapped around the top of the protective screen behind home plate, the start of Tuesday’s game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and visiting Dodgers was delayed by almost two hours, as Rock and his staff scrambled to call in a bee removal expert to the stadium.