Collecting bees with a vacuum cleaner: a surreal scene at the Indian Wells tennis tournament

For the past few days, most of the world’s top tennis players have been taking part in the Indian Wells tournament. It’s a tournament that’s generally quite popular with players, and although it’s not one of the four major tournaments (the Grand Slam ones), it’s still one of the marquee events on the tennis season calendar.

And today, there was a big match between two of the world’s best players, Alexander Zverev and Carlos Alcaraz… but that’s not what particularly caught the eye.

In fact, while the two guys were on court, they had to deal with… a bee infestation.

This forced the referee to interrupt the match, and we were treated to a very long break: it took almost 1h30 to restart the match.

There were so many bees on the pitch that we had to find solutions… and one of them was to try and suck them up with a vacuum cleaner.

Just too good pic.twitter.com/Zr1rNdKOEa

– José Morgado (@josemorgado) March 14, 2024

Honestly, I don’t know who took the initiative to get out a vacuum cleaner, but I’m very impressed to see that they did it without any protection whatsoever.

With the number of bees that were there, it could have ended very, very badly. That said, we seem to have avoided a catastrophe.

One of the two players, Carlos Alcaraz, was not so lucky. He was stung by a bee on the forehead, and it seems to have been a good one.

A rather unusual scene, then, and despite a few stings, we seem to have avoided the worst.

Considering the number of bees that were present, it’s impressive.

In bursts

– Jeff Gorton liked the response of his players on the ice after the Sean Monahan trade.

– In this segment, Pierre LeBrun explains that he doesn’t expect the GMs to change the LTIR rules next week.

– Great read.

– He’s got swag.

KK definitely got the memo. pic.twitter.com/JRmBcWofAd

– NHL (@NHL) March 14, 2024

– Love the image.