Unlike wasps, hornets, and yellow jackets, honey bees are usually pretty great. If you leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone. Also, they make honey, which is delicious. Oh, and don’t forget the whole pollination thing, which is kind of a big deal. Our planet would definitely be better off with more honey bees. But as much as we love our buzzing little friends in small doses, running into millions of angry bees that just fell off a truck sounds like the stuff of nightmares.
The BBC reports that on Wednesday, the straps holding hives full of five million bees came loose while the truck they were on was driving through Burlington, Ontario. That’s a lot of bees to drop in a single location. Arguably, it’s too many bees. Burlington police then had to call in beekeepers to rescue the bees, but even in full beekeeping suits, there were reportedly so many bees, that even they were nervous.
Some of them were indeed stung, but the worst of it was reserved for the driver of the truck who was reportedly stung more than 100 times. The good news is, he didn’t require serious medical treatment after getting stung that many times, and there were paramedics on the scene in case he did. Even so, 100 bee stings still had to have hurt.
“It was something else,” Michael Barber, owner of Tri-City Bee Rescue, told the BBC. “I hope to never experience it again.”
Once Barber and the other beekeepers arrived, it only took a couple of hours to get them back to their hives. Sadly, a few hundred bees reportedly died. But considering the fact that there were five million bees in the hives when they fell off the truck, it could have easily been a lot more.
“Lesson learned. Everybody survived and a few bees were hurt,” Barber told the BBC. “Hopefully the hives will survive the winter.”