Imagine you’re walking through town and see tens of thousands of bees swarming a car. Wouldn’t that be something of a fairytale? Well, believe it or not that’s the kind of sight the residents of Haverfordwest in West Wales had witnessed. Of course everyone was wondering what does a swarm of bees has to do with an SUV car. Well the answer is simple – they were saving their queen!
Apparently, when the 68-year-old granny Carol Howarth has visited a nature reserve a few miles away from her home, the queen bee break into her Mitsubishi Outlander. Since the bees show incredible devotion to their leader, thousands and thousands of honeybees started to chase the car.
A few hours after, Carol visited a local store for some shopping. A local ranger spotted the “big brown splodge” and alerted some beekeepers. The man was worried the bees would be poorly handed.
“I was driving through town when noticed it, ” Tom Moses – a Pembrokeshire Coast National Park ranger said. “Cars were slowing down and people were taking pictures of it. I was a little bit concerned, with it being in the middle of town outside a pub, that someone might get hurt or hurt the bees.”
Soon after, the beekeepers arrived at the scene and the problem seem solved. But it was not even close. “The next day I realized that some of the bees had followed me home,” Carol said. So she called the beekeepers once again. Only this time, the figured out what was actually going on.
“The been was most likely attracted to something in the car, perhaps something sweet, and had got into a gap on the boot’s wiper blade or perhaps the hinge,” Roger Burns of Pembrokeshire Beekeepers, said. “The swarm of around 20,000 had followed her and were sat around on the boot of the car.”
The bees and their queen have been eventually reunited, without anyone getting hurt. However, that was the most bizarre incident, even for Roger, in his entire career; and he’s been beekeeping for almost 30 years.
(Featured image credits Andrew Ranta/Flickr)