‘Bee emergency’: How beekeepers got 5 million angry bees off a road in Ontario

“There’s a bee emergency,” her mother told her. “They need all the beekeepers they can get.”

Mike Barber, a beekeeper in Guelph, Ontario, got the call even earlier as he was lying in his son’s bed, trying to help his 8-year-old get back to sleep. When he finally looked at his phone, he noticed that he had missed 10 calls from a local police officer, asking him for help.

Both beekeepers knew they were in for a serious mission, and so did dozens of others who quickly learned through social media posts and news reports about the swarm of millions of bees churning above the road, about an hour south of Toronto. The Halton Regional Police were warning pedestrians to avoid the area and urged residents and passing motorists to keep their windows closed.

The driver of the bee truck Tristan Jameson, left, walks with the owner of the bees, Alexander Haley, centre, and a beekeeper in Burlington, Ontario, on Aug. 30, 2023. (Carlos Osorio/The Canadian Press via AP)

Tristan Jameson, the commercial beekeeper who was hauling the bees on a trailer attached to a pickup truck, told the Canadian news outlet Global News that he had swerved to avoid something he had seen moving across the road and then “nearly swerved into the ditch, tried to correct, and dumped all the hives.”

After the accident, the bees began an “orientation flight” to try to figure out where their hives were, Jameson said.

Constable Ryan Anderson of the Halton Regional Police Service said the first beekeeper on the scene was stung “about 60-plus times trying to collect the bees.” The man was treated at the scene, and did not appear to need further medical attention, he said.

Beekeeper Mike Osborne uses his hand to look for the queen bee as he removes bees from a car after a truck carrying bee hives swerved on Guelph Line road causing the hives to fall and release bees in Burlington, Ontario, on Aug. 30, 2023. (Carlos Osorio/The Canadian Press via AP)

Barber said that so many bees had escaped from their boxes that “the sky was dark with bees.”

“It was something else,” he said.

To collect the bees, Barber said he and other beekeepers put the smashed boxes back together, giving the bees a visual clue to return to their hives.

“What was a cloud of maybe 5 million bees very quickly became a cloud of maybe 5,000,” he said, adding: “It got calmer. The bees did their thing.”