The Fearless Beekeeper Who Saved the 2024 BNP Paribas Open Tennis Tournament

It’s almost a year later, but Lance Davis still remembers the details of his moment in the sun vividly.

Davis, if you recall, was the beekeeper who famously saved the day during last year’s BNP Paribas Open when he vacuumed away a swarm of bees that had stopped a match between Carlos Alcaraz and Alexander Zverev at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden.

The Desert Sun caught up with Davis as this year’s BNP Paribas Open gets underway, and he detailed that day from when he received the call to how he handled the swarm and even what he told a hesitant Alcaraz to ease his mind and enable him to finish the match.

The call

Davis, who owns and operates Killer Bee Live Removal in Palm Desert, was on a job in Palm Springs about 20 miles away from the stadium when he got a call. He’s been the Tennis Garden’s resident “bee guy” for years, so it wasn’t unusual to get a message from the maintenance crew.

“They said ‘Will you please come out?’ and I had been there earlier in the week and I figured it would be a cluster of bees on a car bumper or in a tree or something, so I told them I’d swing by when I finished the job I was on,” Davis said. “And they said, ‘No, this is right in the main stadium, stadium No. 1 and they’re playing right now and they had to stop playing.’ And I was like, ‘Oh boy.’ So I had to hurry out there. I got out there in about 15 minutes or so using a few shortcuts I know.”

Davis arrived and assessed the scene. The bee cluster wasn’t unique to him but the circumstances were. What’s the best way to handle this situation in a crowded stadium? The bees were swarming the “spider cam,” which is the camera suspended on wires that floats above the action. They very slowly moved the camera with all the bees to a specific corner of the stadium.

Davis, who doesn’t wear any protective equipment and also doesn’t do anything to harm the bees, went to work using his vacuum contraption that looked like something out of “Ghostbusters.”

“I had to go to the top floor and they moved the camera over and all the bees stayed with it,” Davis said. “I guess the bees had already caused a little havoc and had stung Carlos and the referee, but luckily they weren’t allergic and nobody really got seriously hurt.

“I hooked up my equipment and vacuumed them up, put them in a live catch cage,” Davis said. “And when I got all the main cluster off, which took me quite a while to do, I sealed off the entrance (to the cage) with some tape. I knew the queen was in there so I just set the cage inside a housing and set it there and I knew the rest of the bees would come to rest up there.”

Soon after, the coast was clear to start playing again — the total delay lasted one hour and 49 minutes — and Davis was packing up his things to leave, but then he got another urgent request.

Lance Davis meets Carlos Alcaraz

Even after Davis was able to clear most of the bees from the court, Alcaraz was hesitant to continue playing the match, which was tied 1-1 early in the first set. Alcaraz was seriously considering not continuing with the match or asking for it to be postponed.

Davis was asked to talk to Alcaraz, who was stung once on the forehead, and to set his mind at ease and explain that he was no longer in danger.

“I went down to the court and he was saying ‘I can’t focus because there are still bees. I can’t play my game.’ So I told him a few things,” Davis said. “I told him the sun is down and the lights aren’t on and all the bees are going to fly up to the cage where I have the queen inside, because that’s their modus operandi is to land with the queen. And he understood that and then I sort of just gave him like a pep talk and reassured him that it was safe to keep playing. I said ‘Forget bees. Focus on your tennis and go out there and win.’ And that made him smile. And then he did and that was awesome.”

His star turn

That heart-to-heart with Alcaraz, who won the match 6-3, 6-1, is what led to Davis being on the court where he then received the star treatment. The fans were cheering for him. The DJ played the song “Hero” by the Foo Fighters. He made eye contact with Bill Gates who was in the crowd and gave him a thumbs up.

He had a handheld spray bottle to take care of a few more bees, hitting them with a mist that made them more docile.

He walked up the stands to exit and got high fives and selfie requests along the way.

“It’s funny, looking back on it, and people cheering for me and seeing comments from famous people on social media and all that it was a fun experience, but at the time it wasn’t fun, I was just doing my job and I was glad nobody got hurt or had a bad reaction to being stung,” Davis said.

Davis believes in no-kill bee removal, so when he does any job, including the famous one at the Tennis Garden, he saves the bees and brings them back to a large apiary that he owns and operates as part of his business which includes selling the honey he generates.

“So like those bees from that day, I take them to my apiary and introduce them to a new colony of bees, and they sort of start back up again that way,” Davis said. “It’s important to me to try to do that.”

Another unique thing about Davis and it was on display at the Tennis Garden last year is that he doesn’t wear any protective equipment. No bee suit, not even gloves.

He said that it stems from an assignment in 1992 where a dog was stuck in a hole and was swarmed by bees and the fire department and others on hand were putting on their bee suits and he thought it was taking too long.

“I just ran in there because you can’t always take your time,” Davis said. “Now that might have been allergic and that’s understandable, but I just ran in there and grabbed the dog and yanked him out and threw him in an ambulance and they took him to the vet. To be honest, I don’t even know if the dog lived or not, but ever since that day I’ve never worn a bee suit. I just think of getting stung like part of the job, like a carpenter hits his thumb every once in a while, I get stung.”

Davis said he remembers one of the worst occasions happened in Twentynine Palms, and he estimates he got stung about 600 times. Instead of going to the doctor, he used his own patented healing plan that may not be right for everyone.

“I just went home, had a six-pack of beer and sat in the jacuzzi and ended up being fine,” he said with a laugh.

As far as his 15 minutes of fame at the Tennis Garden last year. Davis said on one hand it was an experience he’ll never forget, but on the other hand he was just doing his job.

“And I just charged them my regular fee for removal of a swarm that size,” he said. “Something like $250 or $350. I don’t remember for sure, but it was a really cool day. It really was.”

Shad Powers is a columnist for The Desert Sun. Reach him at shad.powers@desertsun.com. This article republished with permission. 

Watch him in action

Even before the events of last year’s tennis tournament, Lance Davis was and still is the star of a reality TV series called “The Killer Bee Catcher” on EarthX.  EarthX is an international TV network committed to providing entertaining content that also promotes conservation and sustainability. The series follows Davis’ real-life adventures as he extracts swarms and relocates them to his apiary. All of the episodes feature Davis plying his dangerous trade in the Coachella Valley. You can also learn more about Davis at his company’s website killerbeeinc.com.