PALM DESERT, Calif. — It’s a drizzly gray morning in the desert and Lance Davis, the country’s most famous bee catcher, is slightly cranky. He is sitting in his office on the backside of an industrial complex in the middle of the Coachella Valley, with no bees, no honey, no work and no money.
There’s rain in the forecast all afternoon. Davis’ equipment, a “Ghostbusters”-style vacuum that hoovers up swarms of bees without killing them and allows him to relocate them to his apiary 35 miles east, can’t operate in the wet.
He’s the guy that saved Indian Wells last year, when a bee invasion descended on the spider camera above Stadium One during Carlos Alcaraz’s quarterfinal against Alexander Zverev. The bees headed for the bright pink of a terrified Alcaraz’s kit; he got stung twice and didn’t want to resume play when Davis had done his work, because he could still see bees zapping around.
It does not bear thinking about the course that Alcaraz’s life could have taken had Davis not swooped in, sans bee protection, to save the day.
Unlikely tennis fame isn’t what life is all about for Davis, who is 65. He’s had a thing for bees since he was a teenager in Colorado in the 1970s. Some kids get hooked on the clarinet or lacrosse. Davis got hooked on the 4-H Club, the youth development program where he learned about all things agricultural, including bees.
“It’s about emotion,” Davis says, leaning back in his desk chair on a rare desert morning not spent pulling a hive out of a crevasse behind a concrete pillar, or delicately scraping one off a roof.
“Your emotion matters for how the bees treat you. If you’re scared and nervous, they’re going to probably attack you, just because they know they can intimidate you to get away faster. Not all of them are gonna attack you, just a few.”
He pauses for a moment, thinking how to convey the comfort he finds in a swarm. How he crawls under a car or into a crevice filled with thousands of bees without a protective suit, before emerging without a sting. Sometimes those bees are honeybees. Other times they are nasty killer bees, that can be seriously aggressive.
“It’s just like when you hold a newborn for the first time,” he said. “Hi, good to see you. Let’s work with this, let’s get this accomplished.”
He greets his companions with a puff of burlap smoke to throw them off their game. Then he’s vacuuming them up, getting them into a carry cage, and thinking about the next batch of honey he’s going to collect. Sometimes he will scrape some off the comb and give it to the property owner that called for his aid.
About 45 years ago, he got 40 stings on one ankle that swelled up like a softball. A doctor told him he better find another line of work or he was going to die.
“I said, ‘I don’t know, I love bees.’ So I kept doing it and doing it,” he said.
A year after that afternoon at Indian Wells, the legend of Lance Davis continues to unfold. It helps that he resembles an aging bass player in a 70s rock band that had one hit song across forgettable albums, with his shoulder-length brown hair and a perpetual tan. Saturday, he was at the net for the coin toss before Alcaraz’s opening match against Quentin Halys. As he walked the grounds, fans kept stopping him for selfies. Now they show up to Alcaraz’s matches wearing bee costumes, which Alcaraz credited for his stellar play against Denis Shapovalov on Monday night.
“During the whole first set, I was looking at them and laughing, and I always say that when I’m laughing, when I’m having fun on the court, I show good tennis,” Alcaraz said after he had put on a clinic to beat Shapovalov 6-2, 6-4.
“I took a selfie with them at the end, because I think they deserve it.”
Like Alcaraz, who went on to win last year’s title after his apian interruption, Davis is hardly a one-hit wonder. He’s on call for Indian Wells and on staff at two of the big music festivals in the California desert: Coachella, which plays host to some of the biggest acts in the world, and the Stagecoach Festival. Both take place at the Empire Polo Club down the road in Indio. He cruises the club in a golf cart. Sometimes he winds up collecting hives with a few thousand bees; he says he’s come across swarms with as many as 50,000.
That pretty much eats up his April, which is when life starts to get seriously busy for Davis. The Coachella Valley does not go to sleep for 50 weeks until the tennis tournament at Indian Wells returns. The area, which thins out during the steamy summers, has a winter population of roughly 500,000 people. It’s packed with resorts and golf courses and luxury homes.
Those properties are packed with plant-life and flowerbeds. Those flowerbeds get packed with bees, which love them far more than the industrial farms outside the population centers. Industrial farmers use pesticides. The resorts and homeowners generally don’t, at least not on the flowers and trees, and that helps keep Davis busy from sunrise to sunset and sometimes into the evening. He’s even taken a 17-foot hive off the roof of a local hospital.
Fans of tennis, Alcaraz and bees may have only gotten to know Davis last year, but a few years back, Wayne Page, a television producer, heard about him and thought he might have discovered the next Steve Irwin, the late Australian zookeeper who became famous as a crocodile hunter.
Page signed up Davis and created and directed a 13-episode television series, “The Killer Bee Catcher”, which has been airing on EarthxTV, a cable channel, since 2023. When Davis had his star turn at Indian Wells last year, the series began to find a broader audience.
“There is a cool factor about him,” Page said of Davis. “He’s just a quirky character, but he’s not bizarre. Like, I would want to have a beer (with him). A lot of the people in that world who are quirky are kind of edgy too. Like the snake handlers in the Bayou. They’re sort of out there.”
Davis has his moments. He can wax poetic about cuddling with killer bees. And forget about Juan Carlos Ferrero, Alcaraz’s longtime coach. As far as he sees it, he’s the reason Alcarzaz prevailed in Indian Wells last year.
Davis said he spoke to Alcaraz after he’d finished his work, telling the young Spaniard the court was safe. Alcaraz didn’t want to play; two bee stings will do that. Davis told him the sun was going down and the air was cooling. Bees mostly don’t fly at 57 degrees.
Plus, the bees had swarmed the court because they were looking for their queen; the vibrations from the spider camera had thrown them off course. Davis said he had the queen in the cage, and now all the bees were swarming the cage.
“They smell the queen up there, so you’re clear down here,” Davis said he told Alcaraz. “Go out there, focus, stay focused and win.”
He did more than just that. “He won the whole tournament!” Davis exclaimed. The honey, money and all.
(Top photo of Lance Davis: Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press)
