Local Beekeepers Come to the Rescue After Truck Carrying 460 Hives Crashes in Utah
Posted on October 24, 2011
Interstate 15 in southern Utah was partially closed after a truck carrying 460 beehives crashed Sunday night. The Salt Lake Tribune reports that a net helped keep the hives in the trailer, but many of the bees escaped. Several people who tried to come and help out at the accident were stung by bees. The truck driver, the truck driver's wife and a news reporter was also stung. Bees stinging news reporters could explain the lack of video footage for this story.
Corey Jennings, an onlooker who was attacked by the bees, told The Spectrum, that the bee swarm was "insane." He said, "The swarm of them was so big. You couldn't see anything else."
Reuters reports that heroic local beekeepers arrived on the scene and worked all night long to gather the escaped bees. The bees were then moved far away from any metropolitan areas, because the bees are expected to become angry today.
Beekeeper Melvin J. Taylor of Santa Clara, Utah, told Reuters, "We stacked the equipment back together, put them back on trucks and trailers and whatever we could find to move them out of there...Then we tried to move them as far out of the metropolitan area as we could. Because when those bees come alive today they are going to be mad that their house is all (broken) apart."