A semi truck carrying millions of live honeybees overturned on a Washington highway, scattering the flying insects in every direction.
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A swarm of angry bees escaped from an overturned semi truck on Friday April 17 in Lynnwood, Washington. The Washington State Patrol reported that the semi carrying the cargo tipped when the driver was headed onto the interstate. Boxes of bees tipped over, too. They fell off the cargo bed and splintered across the highway unleashing bees in the millions.
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Workers from Belleville Honey and Beekeeping Supply from Burlington, Wash. -- the owners of the bees and their hives -- rushed to the scene to try to contain the bees by sunrise, but failed. Bees became agitated as the sun rose and temperatures got warmer. Some bees left their boxes and stung a few bystanders, including news crews covering the story, reported AJC.com April 17.
The fire department had to assist in containment efforts and they didn’t use smoke, as the beekeepers had done. Early in the morning, they started covering broken boxes with a thick mixture of water and foam that killed many of them so that others would not be stung.
Some of the surviving bees became even more agitated while others stayed in their boxes. Beekeepers on the scene were covered in bees as they worked.
The driver of the semi truck made it out of the situation unscathed but he was said to have been “devastated over the fate of his cargo.” The bees were primarily headed to a blueberry farm near the Canadian border, about 100 miles north of Seattle.
Drivers were urged to keep their windows up and the hashtag #beesafe was popular on Twitter today. Electronic signs alongside the highway touted the message in big block letters, “BEES IN ROADWAY USE CAUTION.”
The respective Twitter feeds covering the event show the story in a series of catastrophic pictures. Hundreds of thousands of bees and their boxes litter the highway and beekeepers attempt to calm and contain (and save!) the swarm.
As one Twitter user said, this event is a bit “Tragic, but also a little bit funny.” Dubbed as “beenado” by some media outlets, the puns won’t stop, despite the devastating loss of so many pollinators. One Twitter user quoted one of the beekeepers on the scene: “They’re just lost souls right now. They don’t have anywhere to go.”
The Seattle Times tweeted that something similar happened not long ago, though the spill didn’t include bees but instead fish. Just last month, a semi overturned on Highway 99, gridlocking traffic and dumping salmon all over the road.
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