This Texas Beekeeper Has 11.2M Followers On TikTok & She Holds Bees With Her Bare Hands
She even helps celebrities with buzzin' bee-problems. 🐝
By far the most popular beekeeper is a Texas woman referred to as @texasbeeworks online with over 11 million followers on TikTok, and she makes daily videos of her performing honeybee removals for clients, but that's not all.
The woman, Erika Thompson, owns her business Texas Beeworks in the Austin, TX area, and in her videos, you can see that she lets the buzzy insects gently crawl on her while she's working, which is an eerie sight that you can't help but stare at.
Every single video Thompson posts on the app have millions of views where you can see her donning regular clothes, as she approaches the hives that the bugs rendered in unlikely nooks, like inside of toilets and on the exteriors of houses.
@texasbeeworks Sitting in a swarm of #bees! #insects #texas #beekeeper #savethebees
She is a professional keeper who has been in practice for over 10 years. She posts videos to educate people on how bees and their colonies work and to also raise awareness about not exterminating them.
In fact, Thompson's job is not to exterminate the hives, but rather to gather the nest and bees to carefully relocate them to a safer place.
In her viral TikToks, she shows the whole process from finding the queen and removing the honeycomb, to rescuing the massive mobs of them by hand and letting them crawl all over her.
The famous beekeeper also explains different things that they do to function, like females kicking the males out of the hive after mating season.
@texasbeeworks See you in the spring, boys! #bees #nature #wintersports #winterbreak
She also creates full-length Youtube videos that demonstrate the whole process a bit more in-depth.
Her Internet fame, of course, didn't go without feedback from other beekeepers, both positive and negative, but nevertheless opinions.
@texasbeeworks And it was another great day of saving the bees! #beekeeper #savingthebees
She even gets calls from celebrities for help, like singer Jason Derulo who helped her remove a colony living at his house once.
Thompson's business serves the central Texas area, and currently only takes bee removal requests from locals.