Early on the morning of Wednesday, August 30, the local police in Halton (Ontario, Canada) spread an alert message on social networks asking the residents of the Burlington district, in the area of the North Guelph Road and Dundas, to stay indoors, with doors and windows closed, and for drivers in the vicinity to close the windows of their vehicles and not stop until they leave the perimeter.
It was not a chemical accident or an attack, but a curious emergency caused by a traffic accident in which five million bees were affected.
The police had received a call at 06:15 (local time) warning that a truck carrying hundreds of bee hives (Apis mellifera) had accidentally lost its cargo and that the remains of the boxes with the honeycombs and swarms of these insects were scattered throughout the area, with an apparent risk to neighbors, drivers and onlookers.
After the first alert on social networks, and after equipping its agents with the little protective equipment available, the police made a second appeal for beekeepers available throughout the region to approach the accident area to try to help restore order and pick up the survivors.
The figure of five million bees in flight certainly seemed a threat to public order and the safety of citizens, the local police considered from the outset.
The amount indicated was not exaggerated. The truck was carrying close to a hundred hives (the exact figure has not been provided) and each of these nests contains a swarm that, at this time of year, can be made up of between 50,000 and 80,000 bees.
The danger of these pollinating insects and producers of honey, wax and jelly, among many other benefits, is generally relatively low, but the security measures were more than justified as it was an accident with broken honeycombs and various mixed colonies. in an apparently hostile environment for these insects.
"It was quite a scene," said Officer Ryan Anderson, one of the police officers deployed to the area. "The boxes were literally on the road and swarms of bees were flying everywhere.
The most normal thing was that one of the humans present received a sting and, in fact, the driver of the truck (who was not wearing protective equipment) could have accumulated more than a hundred of these painful punctures, as explained in statements released by the BBC from Toronto Michael Barber, one of the beekeepers who participated in the rescue work.
The person in charge of the truck, in any case, was quickly treated by the medical teams and did not suffer significant damage, neither from the stingers nor from the traffic accident itself.
Apart from the driver's stings and some other minor repercussions, the bees were not particularly violent.
As will be remembered, honey bees are not aggressive and only sting (humans, for example) when they feel seriously threatened or perceive a danger to their colony. In general, bees avoid responding forcefully whenever they can, among other things because in their sting, bees lose their stinger and a portion of the lower part of their abdomen, causing their death.
The damaged hives were being transferred, in a regular transport, to areas with greater humidity and food availability at the end of summer, which is also registering high temperatures and low rainfall in this area of central-eastern Canada.
About an hour after police posted a notice on social media, several beekeepers reached out to offer help.
At around 9:15 a.m., police said most of the bees had been safely collected and the boxes were being removed. Some hives had been left for uncollected bees to return to on their own.
