Bees make honey, which is delicious, but as pollinators, they’re also absolutely vital to our ability to grow crops. That, in turn, makes the commercial bee industry incredibly important, and how do they move bees around? On trucks, which means those trucks can also crash. And when they do crash, that means a lot of angry bees. Over the years, we’ve seen trucks crash carrying a million bees, five million bees and even 15 million bees, but if the local sheriff’s office is to be believed, the latest crash just unleashed a truly unfathomable amount of bees in Washington — 250 million of them, the Seattle Times reports.
Now, I’m not saying the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Department did its math wrong, but I’m also not going to pretend that isn’t an absolutely unfathomable amount of bees. Surely, they misplaced a decimal or asked the plagiarism machine for an estimate, right? There’s no way one truck was carrying two hundred and fifty million bees at one time, right? And yet, in addition to the Seattle Times, both KIRO 7 and the Bellingham Herald report the same 250 million-bee claim. Apparently, that works out to about 70,000 pounds of hives and bees, which is also a difficult-to-believe amount of weight for one truck to haul, but that’s what’s in the newspaper.
Regardless of how many bees were actually in the truck at the time of the crash, they’re all reportedly — and understandably — unhappy about the crash and have been taking out their anger on the locals. Those people didn’t cause the crash, but bee brains are tiny, and you can’t expect them to know that. Heck, if I loaded you into a truck and dumped you on the side of the road in the middle of the night, you’d probably be pretty aggressive when you woke up, too. Not that I would ever do that. Or would I?
Bring in the bee expert
The good news is, Whatcom County was able to bring in a bee expert, although their advice was just to stay away from the bees, which, I mean, yeah. I could have told you that, and I’m not an expert on anything. On the other hand, what else do you expect them to say when a truck just dumped 250 MILLION ANGRY BEES on the side of the road? If you counted one bee per second, it would take you multiple lifetimes to count that many bees. I’m still not convinced the estimated total is accurate, in part because I don’t want to believe one truck would ever carry that many bees, but even if it’s off by a factor of 10, that’s still 25 million bees, which is still so, so many bees.
Why the truck carrying all those bees crashed, though, is also unclear. It reportedly happened around 4 a.m. on Weidkamp Road, about three miles from the Canadian border. Following a 911 call that reported the crash, the county sent out several deputies and a bee expert, but at about 9 a.m. the bees began to swarm and sting the deputies. Whether that’s because of the crash or because the bees are agents of the elusive Antifa is also unclear, but don’t worry, the sheriff’s department has a plan that involves closing the road and waiting for the bees to reenter their hives.
“We can’t determine what the bees will do,” a sheriff’s department spokesperson told the Seattle Times. “But we can say to stay away from the area to ensure you can’t get stung.”
Washington State Beekeepers Association president Alan Woods, however, expressed more skepticism that the bees could be saved, telling the Times, “Once it gets warm and the bees get active, you’re not going to stop them. The only way they’re going to actually contain them at this point is by [having] a firetruck come in and spray them with water.” Woods also told the paper that every state should ensure it has an “emergency bee response” plan ready to go because transporting bees by truck is so common, saying “There needs to be a plan set in place so that when this does happen, we know what do. I hate that it happens. That’s a lot of bees that are just gone.”
