Beekeeper who cleared swarm from netting at Diamondbacks game now has his own baseball card

The beekeeper who helped clear a swarm of bees from protective netting at an Arizona Diamondbacks game Tuesday now has his own baseball card.

Beekeeper Matt Hilton with Blue Sky Pest Control successfully ended a nearly 90-minute bee delay at the Diamondbacks home game by collecting the bees that had engulfed the screen behind home plate.

On Wednesday, trading card manufacturer Topps, which holds the official license for MLB cards, announced it had made autographed cards of Mr. Hilton emblazoned with a tagline “Bee Afraid, Bee Very Afraid: Bees Swarm in Arizona.”

The cards are on sale on the Topps website for $8.99.

“We can’t overstate how cool this is. All of our technicians are MVPs, we just now have one on a Topps card to prove it,” Blue Sky Pest Control wrote in a post on Facebook.

The Diamondbacks were set to play a home game at Phoenix’s Chase Field against their National League West division rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers, when the bees swarmed the top of the protective netting between the playing field and the stands.

Diamondbacks Vice President of Baseball Operations Mike Rock said another club official reported “we have bees landing on the net right behind home plate.”

“I said, How many? And she said, hundreds — no way, thousands. And I knew we had a problem,” he told The Associated Press.

The game was delayed and the closest sections of seats were evacuated. Mr. Hilton arrived about 70 minutes after the scheduled start of the game. 

He rallied the crowd as he rode in on a cart from right field, stunned the bees with spray, vacuumed them up, wrangled the stragglers and descended the stair lift, all to raucous cheers from the fans.

The spray was not a pesticide and the bees were later released, MLB said.

“So I knew it was going to be a cool experience, but it wasn’t until I went out on the field in the buggy and the fans were just going crazy that it kind of hit me just how big of a deal this was and it just turned into a really neat experience for me,” Mr. Hilton told CNN.

Mr. Hilton also threw out the first pitch, still clad in his beekeeper suit.

“It was a little nerve-racking, I’m not going to lie — a lot of pressure to get this game going,” Mr. Hilton told the AP.

In addition to hailing their bee-beating hero, the home Arizona crowd got to cheer later that night when the Diamondbacks walked off the Dodgers on a 10th-inning homer from first baseman Christian Walker, winning the game 4-3.