Motorway covered in honey after vehicle overturns in state of Georgia
The honeycombs were removed from the broken hives to preserve the bees’ homes
04 Nov 2013
A lorry containing millions of bees overturned in Georgia over the weekend, covering the motorway in honey and releasing millions of the insects.
The lorry was travelling on Interstate 75 near Macon when a tyre blew out.
Its cargo was made up of large boxes of bee hives and honeycombs, which were hurled from the vehicle and lay broken in the road.
Beekeepers were dispatched to aid in the cleanup, which lasted several hours. Monroe County Emergency Agency Director Matthew Perry was also on hand.
That’s the most bees I’ve ever seen,” Mr Perry told The Macon Telegraph. “That was a sticky mess.” He estimated that the total number of bees was in the millions.
Emergency workers sprayed hoses to disperse the bees, and transported the honey-coated wreckage to the side of the road. Beekeepers then carefully removed the honeycombs from the broken hives to preserve the bees’ homes.
Accidents such as this one are not unprecedented in the US. The largest recent occurrence was in Utah in 2011, when a lorry crashed and released a swarm of 25 million bees.
Witnesses of that chaotic event said that the cloud of bees was so thick they could not see anything else. Two people were hospitalised with multiple stings.
The US Department of Agriculture put out a statement after the 2011 incident explaining the prevalence of incidents such as these: "The number of managed honey bee colonies has dropped from 5 million in the 1940s to only 2.5 million today.
At the same time, the call for hives to supply pollination service has continued to climb. This means honey bee colonies are trucked farther and more often than ever before.”
No injuries resulted from Sunday’s crash.