A day after a swarm of honey bees made a surprise appearance at the BSP rally where chief Mayawati was holding forth,the DIG and DM of Lucknow combed the area and questioned people to try and uncover what could have been a conspiracy to derail celebrations of 25 years of the party. Last heard,the two officers had no clue to the whodunnit. Though the bees exited without a sting,the officials seemed clearly stung,convinced that someone made a deliberate attempt to create a commotion at the Ramabai Ambedkar Maidan. Just before the bees showed up,smoke was seen rising from the campus of the nearby Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University. So DIG Rajiv Krishna and DM A K Sagar went to the university campus today and checked with Vice-Chancellor Prof B Hanumaiah on who all were present there just before the bees turned up. But Hanumaiah told them he had declared Monday a holiday to avoid inconvenience to staff and students in view of the rally. Hanumaiah,who lives nearby,said somebody alerted him about a fire,so he rushed to the campus. He found a bush near the boundary wall burning and fire brigade personnel were trying to douse it. But what caused the fire? Hanumaiah suspects some people scaled the boundary wall to avoid the rush on the road. Someone probably threw a lit cigarette, he said. Where did the bees come from? The V-C said he has no idea because there are no hives on the campus. We have no idea where these honey bees came from. I told the inquiry officials the same. The DIG and DM,who inspected the building,also found no beehive. We found no possibility of beehives on the campus, Sagar said. The two officers also sought expert advice from the faculty of the university horticulture department. And the experts had this explanation: honey bees migrate from warm to cooler places between March and June and probably the Monday swarm was doing the same. According to experts,the honey bees arrived near the stage because air-conditioners were functional there and the stage was decorated with flowers, Sagar said. But the inquiry is not yet over. DIG Krishna said: We are still probing if any person was involved in the incident and how the bush caught fire.
