14 Million Honeybees Escaped From an Overturned Truck in Washington State. Local Beekeepers Helped Corral Them
Most of the bees have now been recovered, and the road is open to the public again
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/Sara_-_Headshot_thumbnail.png)
A group of unusual fugitives was buzzing through the air in northwestern Washington state early Friday morning: honeybees.
The bees made their escape as a truck carrying 70,000 pounds of hives rolled over, releasing them into the wild. The driver, who was not hurt, likely “didn’t navigate well enough on a tight turn, causing the trailer to roll,” Amy Cloud, a spokesperson for the local Whatcom County Sheriff’s Department, tells the Seattle Times’ Catalina Gaitán.
At first, the department estimated 250 million bees had gotten loose, but it later corrected that figure, lowering it to 14 million. “Thank you to those who challenged the math and helped us get closer to the true number,” the department wrote on Facebook.
More than two dozen beekeepers, alongside deputies and emergency responders, came to assist at the scene, which unfolded near Lynden, a town close to the Canadian border. Several of the emergency responders were stung, reports Neil Vigdor for the New York Times, and officials urged the public to stay away.
“The goal is to save as many bees as possible,” the sheriff’s office wrote shortly after the incident. To do that, the efforts focused on getting the insects to re-hive and find their queen. Beekeepers also worked to repair about 300 damaged hives, reports Lauren Villagran for USA Today.
“I had the incredible privilege of helping to rescue millions of honeybees,” one of the beekeepers, Derek Condit, wrote in a Facebook post accompanied by video of the swarming bees.
The bees likely didn’t travel too far from the truck, says Gene E. Robinson, an entomologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in an email to the New York Times. Bees are highly social by nature and drawn to their hives, he explains, because “that’s where their queen and the next generation of bees (the ‘brood’) are located.”
Thankfully, most of the bees have now made their way back to their hives, according to a social media post from the Whatcom County government on Monday morning. The number of bees that didn’t survive is still unknown.
“Thank you to the wonderful community of beekeepers,” the sheriff’s department wrote on Facebook. Their efforts helped “ensure the rescue of millions of pollinating honeybees would be as successful as possible.”
This isn’t the first bee escape in Washington. In 2015, roughly 14 million bees escaped a tipped-over truck near Seattle and started stinging people. Honeybees are often transported by truck so that they don’t deplete pollen resources in any one area, per the Seattle Times. Alan Woods, president of the Washington State Beekeepers Association, tells the publication that the state needs an “emergency bee response” procedure.
“There needs to be a plan set in place so that when this does happen, we know what do,” Woods tells the Seattle Times. “I hate that it happens. That’s a lot of bees that are just gone.”
In 2023, about 20 hives of honeybees toppled from a truck in Canada as the driver swerved to avoid a deer. Other truck accidents have unleashed bees in Delaware, dumped young salmon into the wrong river in Oregon and let a few lab monkeys loose in Pennsylvania.
Honeybees are vital pollinators and play an important role in the global food supply. But their numbers, along with those of other pollinators, have been dwindling. In the United States alone, commercial honeybee colonies could face losses of up to 70 percent this year, according to a recent report from researchers at Washington State University.
“Migratory beekeeping is essential for the production of many important fruit, nut and vegetable crops, and migratory beekeepers are unsung heroes,” adds Robinson to the New York Times.
