Most of the time, animals and humans can live side-by-side just fine. But occasional clumsiness – on both the animal’s and the human’s part – can lead to some slightly awkward situations.
This happened to one elderly woman, when she trapped a queen bee in her car, and 20,000 bees swarmed the boot.
65-year-old Carol Howart became concerned, as you rightfully would be, when a trip to a nature reserve left her Mitsubishi Outlander with a beard of bees on its back end.
And they didn’t go away, either – they stayed for a full two days, because Carol didn’t actually realize she had a queen bee stuck in her car.
We might not think of bees when it comes to loyalty, but they’re actually some of the most loyal beings on the planet.
The queen bee is selected by worker bees when it’s just a young larvae, and is fed a special food called “royal jelly” to help it develop into a fertile-rich bee.
After raising the queen bee, the worker bees wait on their new royalty hand and foot, following her around and making sure she’s safe and happy.
The queen bee is a hive-essential, and the other bees would struggle to survive without her.
Hence why it was far from ideal for this hive’s queen to end up trapped in the back of an unknowing elderly lady’s car.
The hive of bees wasn’t on Carol’s car when she’d left the nature reserve, but cleverly, they’d tracked their queen bee down and descended on the car while Carol was doing some shopping.
Tom Moses, a passer-by who watched the whole thing play out, took photos as beekeepers tried to rescue the insects.
He explained what had happened on a Facebook post, calling it a “Bee-rilliant swarmathon!” and writing:
“Driving through town noticed this going on outside the Lower Three Crowns and couldn’t resist getting involved! (bees need our help and I worried that some idiot would come pour boiling water over them or something stoopid!).”
Tom wrote that he’d called the local beekeepers, and two men showed up to sweep the bees into a box. Roger, the first beekeeper, had to head off for a dinner date, which led Tom with the second beekeeper, Andrew.
Tom continued:
“At first bees nicely started going into box. Stung. Then they started to come out again. Hmmmmm. Had a beer. Stung.
“Andrew doing great job, bees in. Stung. Then they were coming out again. Wheres the Queen? In the box, or hiding in the crack between boot and car panel? Stung again. Hmmmmmm. Google.”
After that, Tom spoke to a third beekeeper, who happened to be traveling on the Eurostar train at the time, but offered to help.
Unfortunately, because the car was parked near to a pub, there were a few unwelcome human disturbances.
Tom recalled:
“Drunk bloke from pub went and swept a load of bees off car with hand looking for queen, got stung loads pfffft…..”
Finally, according to Tom’s story, a fourth beekeeper turned up in a full suit. When Tom was happy that all was under control, he left to go back home – so we never will know what happened to the queen bee.
Hopefully the fourth beekeeper realized the cause of the issue: that the queen was trapped!
You can view the full story, as written in Tom’s Facebook post, by clicking here.
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