Treehugger.com reports Carol Howarth was rather perplexed when she noticed about 20,000 bees following her after parking her Mitsubishi in the town of Haverfordwest in Wales. After initial efforts to remove the bees in what seemed to be a successful way, the bees continued returning to her car.
Photos by TOM MOSES on Facebook, see more photos below.
The first time the bees were hugging her car, so te speak, a local man, Tom Moses, saw called in a team of beekeepers. “It was spectacular. I was driving through when I spotted the big brown splodge,” he said. “A lot of people were really amazed by it, 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 do something stupid and get hurt or do something stupid and hurt the bees,” he said.
With the beekeepers on the job, by the time Howarth returned the situation appeared to be resolved. But, no. The swarm kept her in their sights and managed to track her down with her noticed even more bees around her car the next day.
“The next day I realized that some of the bees had followed me home,” she said. So she summoned the beekeepers, who arrived ready for rescue.
“We think the queen bee had been 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,” says Roger Burns of Pembrokeshire Beekeepers. “The swarm of around 20,000 had followed her and were sat around on the boot of the car.”
They eventually found the “adventurous queen” and reunited her with her “subjects”. Burns says that it was the strangest bee-thing he’d seen in three decades of beekeeping. “It is natural for them to follow the queen but it is a strange thing to see and quite surprising to have a car followed for two days. It was quite amusing.”
If you ever found yourself wondering what would happen if the queen bee gets trapped in the back of a car? Well, her troops will come buzzing to her rescue… we know this now!
