In the Dead of Night, an Escape of 250M Bees

You probably don't want to be the guy manning the truck filled with 250 million honeybees when it rolls over in the middle of the night. That's what happened to one driver in northwestern Washington state on Friday when a commercial truck hauling about 70,000 pounds of honeybee hives overturned around 4am local time, close to the Canadian border near Lynden, the Whatcom County Sheriff's Office said, per the AP. It appears the driver didn't navigate a tight turn well, causing the trailer to roll into a ditch, a county emergency management spokesperson said, adding that the driver was uninjured.

Both the AP and the Seattle Times describe a scene in which sheriff's deputies were forced to dive into their cars and hide out at times from the swarm. The overturned semitruck is said to be registered to an Illinois-based cargo company with the green light to transport "general freight," per the Times, which adds "it's not uncommon for beekeepers to transport millions of bees from one location to another, as leaving them in one location for too long can deplete resources for other pollinators."

More than two dozen beekeepers converged upon the scene to try to wrangle the bees, and the goal now is to save as many as possible by cordoning off the area for a couple of days to allow the bees to make their way back to their hives and find their queen bee. However, Alan Woods, president of the Washington State Beekeepers Association, isn't so sure that's possible. "Once it gets warm and the bees get active, you're not going to stop them," he told the Times on Friday. "The only way they're going to actually contain them at this point is by [having] a fire truck come in and spray them with water."

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Woods adds that companies transporting cargo like this should have an "emergency bee response" plan in place for just such an accident, stressing that speed is of the essence to gather back up escaped bees. Dr. Katie Buckley, a pollinator health coordinator for the Washington State Department of Agriculture, is more optimistic about the bees' plight. "Bees are actually surprisingly sturdy," she tells KING 5, reupping the call for people to stay away from the area, as the bees are "probably having a bad day" and are "going to be really agitated until they can get back to their hives." (More bees stories.)