Bees Swarm Historic Downtown Building

Firefighters had to use a ladder to spray foam on the historic Toltec building to disperse a swarm of bees Thursday morning.

The building’s owner, Billy Abraham, said he heard about the bees Wednesday and when he arrived at the site, he said he say the entire tree across the building on the 500 block of East San Antonio covered in bees.

“The whole block had thousands and thousands of bees,” Abraham said. “They even went down all the way to the Mexican consulate,” which is four blocks away.

Abraham said exterminators were brought in to deal with the problem Wednesday evening, and in his opinion, the bees weren’t happy about it.

“The bees were a little irritated, I guess, because they tried to mitigate the situation yesterday and when people started showing up here they were angry and started attacking them.”

Tomas Concha, manager of Mr. A’s restaurant which is housed in the building, said that made for a chaotic scene.

“There were quite a few people running around, running from the bees. My friend you saw here right now, one of our chefs (was) getting attacked.”

Firefighters were called out in the morning and had to spray the faade of the five-story Toltec building with foam.

Pat Worthington, curator for the El Paso County Historical Society, told ABC-7 there are no laws or rules that prohibit the fire department from using foam on a historic building to get rid of bees. Historical designations impact construction or remodeling on buildings themselves, not emergency incidents, she said.

As Abraham watched the white spray drip from the brick and sandstone structure erected in 1910, he joked, “I always knew this was good real estate. I just didn’t know it was this sweet.”