A truck carrying 70,000 pounds of beehives full of around 14 million honey bees overturned in Washington, leaving a road closed for around a day as the bees returned to their hives.
The truck overturned on Weidkamp Road near Lynden, Washington, at around 4 a.m. local time Friday, the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office said on social media, with the beehives falling off the truck just after 9 a.m. This let the roughly 14 million bees inside the hives loose.
The sheriff’s office originally estimated that the truck contained 250 million bees but later revised the number downward. Most of the bees were expected to have survived the incident, the Washington State Department of Agriculture wrote on social media.
The truck was carrying millions of bees so they could be let loose as pollinators.
“We get the pollinators up, so you know we can have our raspberries and strawberries and all the different crops we grow,” WCSO Emergency Management Deputy Director Matt Klein told KOMO-TV.
Master beekeepers responded to the scene and set the hive boxes back up in order to let the bees return on their own, with that work being completed by around 6 p.m., the sheriff’s office said. Several people at the scene, including beekeepers, deputies and media, were stung.
“I’ve never had that many bees – angry bees – at one time,” beekeeper Russell Deptuch told the Cascadia Daily News.
Weidkamp Road remained closed, and video from the scene posted Friday evening showed bees crawling along the truck’s cab and buzzing around.
On Saturday morning, the sheriff’s office reported that the bees had been recovered and Weidkamp Road was due to be reopened sometime in the afternoon.
Law enforcement did not say what caused the commercial truck carrying the hives to overturn.
