BUCKFIELD – The first time the lights above Bessey Field flipped on – igniting 21 floodlights on eight towers – the beekeeper next door knew there would be trouble.

Bees and night baseball make lousy neighbors.

“The light is so bright, the bees will be drawn to it if the temperature is much above 50 degrees,” said Tony Bachelder, a beekeeper for 35 years.

He imagines children and adults being stung by his bees, anxious at being woken from their hives by the lights. He also worries that swarms may desert his hives and never return.

“After they turned the lights on, it didn’t take us very long to determine: It’s them or us,” Bachelder said.

He has hired a lawyer, offered to buy the town-owned field and pay the cost of moving the lights somewhere else.

“I don’t have anything against baseball,” Bachelder said.

Town leaders aren’t sure what they will do about the beekeeper’s $50,000 offer.

On Tuesday night, Town Manager Glen Holmes and selectmen met on the ball field and watched as the lights were turned on for the second time. Town officials talked but made no decision.

Meanwhile, members of an adult slow-pitch softball league, which have used the field for the past three years, tried crushing balls past the center-field fence and onto Paris Hill Road. The ball field has been used off and on for 30 years, by Little League teams and Babe Ruth kids and adults in pickup games.

Those games always ended at sundown.

“You couldn’t ask for anything better,” player Patrick Cullins said, looking at the illuminated field. The lights completed lots of hard work by the league and the town’s Recreation Committee to prepare the field, he said.

Yet, if Bachelder’s offer can give the town another field just as good, Cullins is fine with that.

“Everybody’s willing to work with Tony,” Cullins said. “I understand the bees are his job. Maybe he’s just a little bit stubborn.”

During Tuesday night’s practice, Bachelder’s bees stung no one.

“It’s a little too cold,” he said. He swatted mosquitoes as he stood in the light streaming over from the ball field. Beside him, four hives sat quietly.

With a little more heat, as many as 200,000 bees might have been loosed on the players and selectmen, he said. At times, he’d have many more bees in the small field, sandwiched between his house and the ball field.

Bachelder’s business, Tony’s Honey and Pollination Service, is one of the biggest bee outfits in Maine. The field, which has a dry, sandy base, serves as a staging area for his work.

“I don’t have anyplace else to go,” he said.

He keeps as many as 800 hives, which he hires out to growers around the state. And last year, Bachelder harvested 35,000 pounds of honey.

He figures the ball field’s lights could put him out of business. With 11 years to go before he retires, the beekeeper figured the lost income would be substantial. The town could buy him out with a check for $1.1 million, he said.

Before they arrived at the field, selectmen read a letter from Bachelder’s lawyer, Clifford Goodall of Augusta, that included the offer for the ball field and a warning that the town would be liable for loss of bees and any harm the rogue bees would cause if they are stirred up by the ball field lights.

“Either they’ll burn their wings off or they’ll chase movement,” Bachelder said.

Town leaders plan to take no action on the ball field until their next regular meeting, Holmes said. It is scheduled for June 16.

A day earlier, the first game is scheduled beneath the lights. Kids between the ages of 8 and 12 plan to take the field.

Bachelder said he doesn’t want anyone to get hurt. In sunlight, the bees merely do their work, pollinating and making honey. In the middle of the afternoon, Bachelder stood beside the hives and listened to the hum inside.

“They’d rather keep to themselves,” he said.