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Wearing only a T-shirt, blue jeans and sneakers – and no gloves – Nathan Thompson reached up and gingerly pulled down the branch of a crepe myrtle tree as his father leaned in and clipped a branch holding a swarm of about 40,000 bees.

The pair of beekeepers said the swarm had set up shop in a grassy area at a townhouse community along Thomas Jefferson Place in Fredericksburg, Virginia. A resident called law enforcement to report the bees, but an animal control officer realized the third-generation beekeeping family might be of more assistance.

The swarm was about the size of a small child, measuring 3 feet tall and 2½ feet wide. It weighed about 40 pounds.

Even for them, it was one of the biggest swarms of honey bees the Thompsons had seen in their decades raising and caring for bees. It took hours to make sure all of the bees relocated to beehive boxes before they were taken to Thompson’s house.

“We had a moment of reverence, admiration and ‘holy crap,’ ” Nathan Thompson said Wednesday as he recalled the incident. “We definitely thought, ‘That’s a big one.’ ”

Although Thompson and his dad didn’t count the bees one by one, he said he is fairly confident that given the size of the swarm, it likely contained about 40,000 of them.