The Secret Life of WH Bees

In early April of 2009, I began my training as a White House booth producer.  I came over to the White House, and first and foremost, received a tour of the facilities that the press are allowed to roam: I saw the James S. Brady Press Briefing room; I saw the Lower Press offices and got to meet Bill Burton; I saw the Palm Room, which acts as the gateway for the press to access the South Lawn; I saw what is called ‘The Pool’ – what used to be an underground swimming facility had now become a storage full of servers, phone lines, and fiber optics for the press booths, camera locations, and tape racks to function; and, I saw the stone patio known as Pebble Beach where all the networks and cable networks have their North Lawn liveshot locations.  It was a great tour.

But, something was slightly awry that day – there was some commotion at Pebble Beach during that portion of my tour.  It was a slow news day, so this was really the only pressing matter that demanded the booth producers’ attention: our correspondents, and other network correspondents, were having trouble doing their live shots because Pebble Beach had become overrun by honey bees.  There is a bee hive on the South Lawn of the White House (Michelle Obama has created two White House icons in both her vegetable garden, and this new bee hive).  The original beehive must have spawned another queen bee, and that queen flew over to the North Lawn and created a ’satellite campus.’

The Press Office, spurred by our phone calls to do something, dispatched the White House beekeeper to box up the queen, and move her residence elsewhere.  Our North Lawn cameraman for that afternoon unplugged from lines, and shot tape elements of the ‘bee wrangling,’ which I have displayed below:

The tape elements were good – so good that a pitch was made to the Nightly EP to include it in a VO for Nightly News.  They didn’t bite, but the footage was fed to the entire NBC community, and our tape elements aired that evening on the local NBC station’s (WRC) 5pm broadcast.

Later that day, having fed the ‘bee-roll’ (get it?) to the NBC family, the booth producer and I co-wrote an editorial note for First Read, MSNBC’s political blog page about the happenings of Washington.  We called it ‘The Secret Life of WH Bees” – <http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/04/09/1887660.aspx>