Las Vegas Buzzing Over the Demise Of Millions of Bees

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The New York Sun

It was not your ordinary traffic problem. A flatbed truck containing 480 bee colonies crashed into the wall of a highway ramp Wednesday afternoon, spilling bees onto the highway about a mile west of the old Las Vegas strip.


The crash closed the ramp for more than four hours, and the town has been buzzing about it ever since.


The driver was traveling from Utah to California with bees intended to pollinate the state’s almond crop. He was passing through a large interchange where the ramp veers off to the left, and the hives swung off to the right.


“He just took that curve too fast,” said a Las Vegas Fire and Rescue spokesman, Tim Szymanski. “The load shifted and went over the side of the bridge and fell about 30 feet to the ground.”


Mr. Szymanski estimated the number of bees at “a couple of million” and described the insects as European honeybees. He told the Sun there were no injuries: “We didn’t even have a report of a sting” resulting from the mishap. He did, however, hear that live television crew members got stung by getting too close.


Authorities sprayed the insects with water and foam, but Mr. Szymanski said the owner of the bees would have to hire exterminators to kill the rest. Mr. Szymanski said the bees are in a “remote part of the interchange.”


The insects are hard to kill or capture in the sunlight, but they do settle down at night, when many form around a pillar on one of the bridges, Mr. Szymanski said.


Some were saddened by the bees’ death.


“You think they could have found a solution other than killing all those bees,” said Hugh Raffles, a cultural anthropologist from the University of California at Santa Cruz who is writing a book about humans and insects. Mr. Raffles gave a talk at the New School University last month on “the language of bees.”


This is not the first mishap this year with trucks and bees: Reuters reported in August that a truck driver in Greven, Germany attempted to slap a wasp and veered his vehicle into a rampart, spilling 15 tons of jam jars, drawing even more wasps as the tasty jam coated the road. In another incident in Las Vegas in October, a truck carrying about 11 million bees broke down on Interstate 15. Thousands of the insects died from the heat or escaped.


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