A man who went shopping in New Mexico returned to a car filled with 15,000 honey bees who had apparently got in through an open window while he spent 10 minutes buying groceries.
Astonishingly, the man – who was not named in the New York Times report detailing his unexpected travel companions – did not notice the sudden presence of a giant swarm of buzzing insects on his vehicle’s back seat until he was driving away.
“Then he turned back and looked and like was ‘holy cow’,” Jesse Johnson, an off-duty firefighter and paramedic whose hobby is beekeeping, said of the man’s reaction in an interview with the paper. “He called 911 because he didn’t know what to do.”
Johnson, and his fellow firefighters, helped the man remove the bees and put them in an empty hive box.
He said the bees were likely swarming with a queen and looking for a new home – which makes them more docile and easier to handle as they are not defending their turf.
The whole incident passed largely without injury – but not entirely.
“One guy got stung on the lip, and we made fun of him the next morning,” Johnson told the Times.