By Phil Helsel -
NBC News
An “invasion of bees” forced a game to be stopped this Thursday on one of the courts at the BNP Paribas Open tennis tournament in California.
A video showed the insects flying around the camera lens and the players.
“The game has been suspended due to an invasion of bees,” the tournament reported in a message on the social network X, in which they included an emoji of a bee.
A Tennis Channel video showed bees hovering over one of the cameras in the facility.
In a video, Carlos Alcaraz, who was facing Alexander Zverev, is seen shooing away the bees and then stepping back and
looking around in confusion
.
The announcer commented that there was “a problem with the bees”, and the audience was heard laughing, before the pause in the game was announced.
[This is Polk, the 'citrus capital' county of Florida that led the moves within the US in 2023]
“Advantage [for the] bees,” indicated the channel on the X social network.
The BNP Paribas Open, which runs from March 3 to next Sunday, is in the quarterfinals.
The tournament is played at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden.
[SpaceX successfully launches Starship, the largest rocket in history, but it is destroyed upon returning to Earth]
Indian Wells is a city of about 5,000 people
located in the Coachella Valley, southwest of Joshua Tree National Park.
An invasion of bees suspends play between Carlos Alcaraz of Spain and Alexander Zverev of Germany during the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells Tennis Garden, in Indian Wells, Calif., on March 14, 2024.Matthew Stockman / Getty Images
The tournament also shared a video of a man using a vacuum cleaner to trap the bees.
The match resumed later.